Words of the year

The site: www.your

dictionary .com/about/

topten2003.html

Top 10 lists are one of the media’s favorite year-end pastimes. What makes this one interesting is that it takes the top-10-new-stories concept one step further, listing not the news but the terms it inspired.

Topping the lists of new words, names and phrases are, not surprisingly, “embedded,” “Saddam Hussein” and “shock and awe.”

The site: www.lssu.edu/

banished/archive/2004.php

If the words on the above-mentioned site seem not just obvious but annoying, this one will serve as commiseration with its Annual List of Words Banished From the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.

Michigan’s Lake Superior State University’s Word Banishment Selection Committee has been compiling these lists since 1976, but this year drew the most nominations: 5,000. The top nominee: “metrosexual,”

followed by “X” (as in extreme), “bling-bling,” “embedded journalist” and “shock and awe.”

The site:www.worth1000

.com/cache/contest/contest

cache.asp?contest_id

=2044&start;=1&end;=10

&display;=photoshop

Paris Hilton hardly needs any more publicity. Since her recent videotape sex scandal and reality TV adventures, the super-rich heiress to the hotel empire has been all over the news. If you’re looking for a different take on Hilton, you might want to check out this site, which invited PhotoShop pros to clean up her image and make her “into the prim and proper daddy’s girl we all know she really wants to be.” In addition to nurses and various pop culture icons, nuns were a popular choice for the made-over Hilton, as were various famed humanitarians: Mother Teresa, Lady Di and Audrey Hepburn.