Amy Rosenberg, “Occupied with the Word of the Year 2011” (Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 26, 2011)
The American Dialect Society, which will announce its 20th annual Word of the Year on Jan. 5, found itself just one in a crowd of word obsessives this year as a formerly obscure venture went mainstream, or at least social media-stream. Words – everyone’s texting and hashtagging them.
“I see a social-media effect in terms of interest in talking about word of the year,” said Ben Zimmer, editor of the Visual Thesaurus and a leading WOTY guy, head of the Dialect Society’s New Words committee (a supercommittee if ever there was one.)
“It’s something that people latch on to. When you look at something like occupy as the front-runner, its success is its ability to be modulated, to fit in different environments. Twitter allows for it to spread quickly, boiling down a complex word or movement.”
Read the rest here.