Tweet It: Social Media Terms Dominate Top New Words

Forget wallet biopsies, death panels and Obamacare. Politics, it appears, is so last century. The words of 2009 are all about social media.

Though “Obama” – the “word stem,” mind you, not the president – did make it to No. 2 on the Global Language Monitor list, “Twitter” ( “the ability to encapsulate human thought in 140 characters”) was its top pick.

The American Dialect Society is whistling the same tune, though it went with “tweet” (“noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message”) rather than Twitter.

The dialect society expanded beyond social media for its word of the decade, however, making a grab for the entire Web by creating, and crowning, a lowercase “google“ (  “a generic form of ‘Google,’ meaning ‘to search the Internet’”). Watch out for those trademark attorneys!

The New Oxford American Dictionary went for a word popularized by that other social media giant, and even provides a sentence using the word in context (just like your fourth-grade teacher told you to): “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.” However, lots of commenters have questioned the choice. Apparently when people want to remove their roommates, they usually just defenestrate them – and if they really don’t like them, they “defriend” them too.

The Webster’s New World word of the year is less about social media per se than it is about what happens if you’re too busy unfriending your roommate on your PDA to realize that the traffic light has just turned red. What happens, of course, is that you become guilty of “distracted driving,” which Webster’s says happens to many people “when they use digital devices on the go.”

But lest you think the Webster’s editors have nothing but digital devices on the brain, they throw in some literary terminology to bring their word choice back to the world of printed matter. Perhaps you’ve been driven to distraction trying to remember what it’s called when the target of the modifier in a phrase has been changed, as with drunk driving, in which it is the driver, not the driving, who fails the Breathalyzer test. If so, fret no more; the phenomenon is known as hypallage, note Webster’s New World editors, and can be seen in other terms as well, like “restless night” (“the night that was so eager to update its status it just couldn’t sit still”).

And finally, Merriam-Webster’s, along much the same lines, has selected as its word of the year… “admonish.” For those not hip enough to fully comprehend what this word has to do with finding out that someone you haven’t seen in 10 years has a sore throat (ahem, I mean what this has to do with the bedazzling glory of social connectedness), it means: (verb) to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner.

Yup, that’s right, Merriam-Webster’s just took a regular, standard, boring dictionary entry and bumped it up to Word of the Year. It didn’t even bother looking past the A’s. Its excuse is that its annual picks are “based on actual user lookups” in the online dictionary and thesaurus. Here’s what the dictionary had to say about its word choice:

“‘Admonish shot to the top of the list three days after Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during a speech made by President Obama, and it remained among our top lookups for weeks,’ said Peter A. Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s Editor at Large. ‘When the House announced plans to “admonish” Rep. Wilson, the word was understood to be technical or official, and it has been repeated often in coverage of recent contentious political issues. While this particular story wasn’t very important in the context of a year’s worth of news, it triggered enormous interest in this word.’”

Allow me to be so bold as to admonish you, Merriam-Webster’s. Not for having the unbridled temerity to use a real word that takes up way too much room to qualify for use in a tweet, but because your choice was the most mechanical of all, employing as judge only the algorithm tasked with calculating the number of lookups. Just as the power of virtual friendship is making its way to the thumb-typing masses yearning to make contact (albeit only if it takes three seconds or less), you failed even to take a swipe at capturing the semantic zeitgeist of the year, however subjective and fallible such an attempt might be. How very unsociable.

Photo by M i x y