Teachers and students alike may tend to think of words as static items in the dictionary, sturdy building blocks of our vocabulary that have been solemnly passed down from earlier generations.
In my day job as executive editor of Vocabulary.com, I look at ways that we can make the English lexicon come to life through fun, engaging gameplay and rich online features that clearly illustrate how words work in the world.
But earlier this month, I was wearing another hat, as chair of the American Dialect Society’s New Words Committee. In that capacity, I preside over Word of the Year proceedings at the society’s annual conference, held this year in Portland, OR, in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America.
ADS members see language as ever-changing, with innovations coming from all quarters. In the Word of the Year vote (WOTY to its friends), which the ADS has held every year since 1990, we get to shine a spotlight on some of the more creative additions to English. It’s not for nothing that The New York Times calls it “The Super Bowl of Linguistics.”
Sometimes the WOTY choices are not new words per se, but they instead pour new wine in old linguistic bottles. Consider the top choice for 2013: because. In an innovative style frequently found online, because can be directly followed by a noun (“because science”), an adjective (“because tired”), or an interjection (“because hooray!”). Now, that’s not how because would be handled in a language arts classroom focusing on standard English, but in informal usage, the conventions of language are often much more flexible.
At our Portland meeting, the WOTY festivities got underway at a nominating session, at which we selected leading candidates in a number of categories, including Most Likely to Succeed, Most Useful, Most Outrageous, and so forth. Often, we come up with a new, ad-hoc category that covers a particular topic or trend. While there was some support this year to create a category for emoticons and emoji, ultimately the attendees decided on another category that reflects changes in online discourse: Most Notable Hashtag.
Hashtags, those words or run-together phrases preceded by a hash sign (#), first appeared on Twitter as a method of organizing conversation, but they have become an increasingly important vehicle for all manner of online talk. (The word hashtag itself was Word of the Year in 2012.) One significant use has been for mobilizing social and political action by means of pithy slogans. For instance, when more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls were abducted by militants, the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls was used to bring attention to the tragedy.
During the voting session to pick the cream of the crop in the different categories this year, the runaway winner in the Most Notable Hashtag category was #BlackLivesMatter, which saw a great deal of use in protests over the lack of indictments against police officers in the cases involving the deaths of two black men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner. In fact, the momentum was so strong for #BlackLivesMatter that it turned out to be the overall winner for Word of the Year as well.
When hashtags are based on multi-word phrases (even with the spaces removed), they might not seem like obvious candidates for a Word of the Year contest. But the ADS has always made room for phrases in its WOTY voting, as long as those phrases are used lexically; that is, as vocabulary items that one could imagine appearing in a dictionary. (In 2004, the winner was not one phrase but three: red state, blue state, and purple state, to describe whether a state’s voters prefer Republicans, Democrats, or a mix of the two.)
A hashtagged phrase like #BringBackOurGirls or #BlackLivesMatter pushes the boundaries of wordhood even further, since they are based on full clauses. But the process of “hashtagification” goes a long way in making such phrases more lexical. Since the vote, the linguistic debate over hashtags has raged on, including in a piece in The Economist.
Other WOTY nominees were more obviously word-y. Often they were drawn from youth slang, which is always a fertile breeding ground for neologisms. This year, those words included bae, a now-popular pet name derived from babe (though some have provided it with a folk etymology, claiming that it is an acronym for “Before Anyone Else”).
Some seemingly new slang items have actually been kicking around in English for decades. As I wrote in my weekly column for The Wall Street Journal, the word salty won as Most Likely to Succeed, based on its current usage to mean “exceptionally bitter, angry, or upset.” But that sense of the word is actually rooted in African-American slang of the 1930s, when “jumping salty” was a phrase that hepcats used to refer to someone becoming suddenly angry or annoyed.
The winner in the Most Useful category was another established term provided with a new wrinkle. The word is even, based on a phrase that paradoxically expresses one’s inability to express oneself: “I can’t even.” A verb, perhaps “handle” or “deal,” is missing from that sentence, suggesting the speaker is at a loss for words from being overwhelmed by circumstances. Creative types have extended that to treat the even of “I can’t even” to be a verb in its own right, fashioning variations on the theme like “I have lost the ability to even.”
Students are no doubt familiar with many of these novel and playful turns of phrase, but they might not realize that linguists and lexicographers are also taking note. And while much of the cutting-edge slang of today will soon fade away from common usage, some of these new terms may become entrenched in our lexicon and find their way into dictionaries. Every generation makes its own unique linguistic contributions, and even if these contributions might seem frivolous or evanescent at the time, they are all part of the dynamic tapestry of the English language.
Ben Zimmer is a linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut. He is the executive editor of Vocabulary.com and the language columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He is also the former language columnist for The Boston Globe and The New York Times Magazine. He was recently named the recipient of the first-ever Linguistics Journalism Award from the Linguistic Society of America.