MANY organisations pick a word of the year, but this blogger was too distracted by the holidays to notice most of the ones that were announced last year. In any case, I have always been partial to the American Dialect Society (ADS) awards, announced last week, but this year I have to admit that I wasn't impressed by many of the winners. A few thoughts.

Most useful: "-(po)calypse, -(ma)geddon". Wait, can two combining forms be "the most useful word of the year"? First, neither is a word even under a pretty expansive definition of "word". I'd consider a pronounceable acronym or an obviously fixed two-word phrase a "word". But something that can't stand on its own? Two such somethings? That have also been used frequently before 2012? The first Los Angeles "carmageddon" was in 2011 and New York's "snowpocalypse" happened in 2010.

Most creative: "gate lice". In case you missed this one, as I did, this refers to people crowding around an airport gate waiting to board. Not a new phenomenon at all, so even if this was coined in 2012, it doesn't seem very zeitgeisty for a Word of the Year.

Most unnecessary: "legitimate rape". It was a dark day when Todd Akin added this one to America's national lexicon. The Republican senatorial candidate mused that "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing [a potential pregnancy] down." "Legitimate rape" packs quite a punch: in one two-word phrase it contains the proposition that many rapes are fake or illegitimate, and that's before we even arrive at the second preposterous proposition, that the female body can "shut that whole thing down". "Legitimate rape" is a pretty unnecessary phrase, so I'll nod along with the WOTY voters on this one, though a wag might say that the phrase was necessary for keeping Todd Akin away from high office.

Most outrageous: "legitimate rape". No contest here.



Most euphemistic: "self-deportation". This year, Mitt Romney was a one-man factory of memorable phrases. Unfortunately for him, most of them were not memorable in an "Ask not what your country can do for you" kind of way. He said he had "binders full of women" he considered for appointments when he was elected governor. He called the 47% of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes a class of irredeemable moochers, making "47%" a contender for the big Word of the Year Prize. But when he said that life should be made so intolerable for illegal immigrants that they would resort to "self-deportation", ie, saving the government the trouble of rounding them up, he earned this prize for the year's top euphemism.

Most likely to succeed: "marriage equality". Well, we certainly hope so at The Economist. 'Marriage equality" remains one of those contested phrases, though. It is beloved by its proponents. Its opponents are more likely to refer to "gay marriage" or, worse, "homosexual marriage", knowing that these phrases smack of "special privileges for a fringe group" to many Americans. If "marriage equality" does indeed succeed, it will be because the political case for it is rolling nicely downhill.

Least likely to succeed: "YOLO" and "phablet". Indeed, both are pretty silly. YOLO, which improbably enough was also nominated for "most useful", stands for "you only live once". It is apparently meant to be humorously self-deprecating. This makes sense, since "you only live once" is short and easy to say already, so YOLO can only be meant to be ridiculous. As for "phablet", someone needs to tell its coiner that you need more than a pronounceable portmanteau to succeed. You need one that clearly recalls what the two elements were originally. No one could mistake what "brunch" is. If I told you there was a coffeetastrophe in my office, at the very least you'd know right away that it was a catastrophe involving coffee. Cofftastrophe, by contrast, probably wouldn't be enough to invoke the coffee. And maybe for the same reason, the word phablet fails to invoke phone for me. Phail, as the kids might say.

Election words: Wait, Mitt Romney is up again? This time it's "binders full of women" for the win. Sure, this lit up the news and Twitter when Mr Romney said it, but I expect a Word of the Year to have some staying power, and I don't expect "binders full of women" to do so.

Finally, the Word of the Year to beat all words of the year, the word that truly summed up 2012. Are you ready?

#hashtag

#hashtag? Word of the Year 2012?

Twitter has been around for years. So have its hashtags. Twitter rocketed to international prominence in 2009 when it emerged as a source of information on (and a means of expressing support for) the uprising in Iran. A writer for America's National Public Radio wrote "the revolution will be tagged" back then. Since then Twitter has grown, sure. But I don't recall any memorable single hashtag moments in 2012. I don't recall hashtags reaching some kind of cultural tipping point so that we were all talking about hashtags suddenly. Ben Zimmer, the head of the ADS new words committee, gamely argued that this was the year hashtags "became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk". Either I missed that crucial tipping point, or it was illusory to begin with, and almost any of the other nominees would have been better than#hashtag. My first bet was that political junkies were split between 47%, fiscal cliff and marriage equality, letting the past-its-prime dark horse #hashtag squeeze through. But no, "#hashtag" made it to a runoff with "marriage equality" and won.

Ah well. Here's to 2013. Anyone want to stick their neck out predicting this year's winner?

