Time Magazine has done a round-up of all the various words of the year announced by different publishers and monitoring organisations (article here), and if you want to you can vote for the word that you think should be word of the year.
I have written on some of the words before, but some were new to me. I liked attachiant, which was a French organisation's choice as word of the year. Attachiant is a blend of attachant, captivating or endearing, and chiant, a slang word meaning 'bloody nuisance'. So attachiant describes someone you can't live with, but nor can you live without them.
Then there's the verb to Murdoch, defined as 'to bring under the control of Rupert Murdoch', as in 'the Wall Street Journal was totally Murdoched in 2007'.
Following on from staycation, there's also austercation, a blend of austerity and vacation. Whereas to staycation means to holiday at home, austercation means to holiday in a cheaper destination, closer to home.
Time's full list is here.
Has anyone ever done a study on how long contrived words such as these and many like them stay in use and eventually make their way into common usage? I don't know what one woukd do with the data, but it would be interesting.
Posted by: John | December 09, 2011 at 12:56 AM
Apologies for the "woukd".
Posted by: John | December 09, 2011 at 01:00 AM
Thanks, John. I don't know of any data, I'm afraid. It's odd how some words capture the imagination and others disappear without trace. It depends, I suppose, on whether they are picked up and used by the media, which seem to have the power over these things.
Posted by: Virtual Linguist | December 09, 2011 at 12:06 PM