Looks like ‘blog’ won’t be defenestrated, after all

The journey of the word “blog” into the mainstream is now complete. Late last month, Merriam-Webster announced that “blog,” the crude but catchy name for an Internet journal, was the most searched-for word at its online dictionary,

www.m-w.com, in 2004.

Reuters said the word “came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year’s presidential campaign.” Politics were behind other popular searches at Merriam-Webster’s site; “incumbent” was second, followed by “electoral,” and “partisan” also made the top 10.

(The rankings exclude profanity and such grammar- and spelling-related searches as “affect” and “effect.”)

It didn’t take long for Merriam-Webster’s announcement to be misinterpreted. The Boston Herald wrote that “blog” was “the most frequently looked-up word on the Internet these days.” Not quite.

One of the most intriguing words came in at No. 10 on Merriam-Webster’s list: “defenestration,” from the Latin word fenestra for window. It means throwing something out the window.

In addition to old words that gained new popularity this year, language lovers are rounding up their favorite buzzwords and neologisms (newly coined words) from 2004.

The American Dialect Society will hold its annual Words of the Year convention Jan. 7 in San Francisco. Among its nominees are “wardrobe malfunction,” for Janet Jackson’s revealing Super Bowl halftime show, “Poddict” for a frequent user of iPods, and “Google-aire” for someone who gets rich by investing in Google.

Last year’s winner was “metrosexual”; in 2002 it was “weapons of mass destruction” (for more previous winners, go to

www.americandialect.org/woty .html).

Chav’s small buzz

The Oxford English Dictionary named “chav” as its buzzword of 2004. The word, which was named the word of the year in British author Susie Dent’s new book, “Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report,” means a young person with little education and manners who buys expensive brand-name clothes and accessories. But unlike previous OED selections, such as “sudden death” in 1927 and “fast food” in 1951, “chav” has yet to catch on outside Britain.

Meanwhile, Webster’s New World College Dictionary has chosen another derogatory term for youth as its word of the year: “adultescent.” It means an adult who fails to display the maturity and independence expected of a member of his age group. (“Kidult” and “rejuvenile” are synonyms but less common.) Although “adultescent” may have gained greater currency this year, the website Word Spy (www.wordspy.com) has traced “adultescent” back to 1996.

That’s the problem with naming words of the year. As “blog” proves, a word’s journey from coinage to mainstream -- and apparent staying power -- takes longer than a year. The Oxford English Dictionary entered “blog” as both a noun and a verb back in 1999.

“Once somebody like me hears them, they’re almost certain to be a couple years old,” says Erin McKean, Chicago-based editor in chief of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press. “If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.”

So the best time to name the word of 2004 may be toward the end of 2005, or 2009 and beyond.

“It’s difficult to choose a word of the year in the year that you’re in. It’s one of those things that hindsight makes more apparent,” McKean says. “It’s like looking at pictures from 10 years ago, and you notice the flannel and the ripped jeans. At the time, it didn’t look to you like a real fashion trend.”

But choosing a new word from the outgoing year as the word of the year has become a rite of passage.

“I think we would all like to believe that every new event demands a new word,” McKean says.

“But we’re environmentally conscious with our words. We recycle words we’ve got.”

Not that McKean doesn’t keep an eye out for new words. She’s putting the finishing touches on the second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary, due out this spring. Among the additions to this volume will be “sizeism,” for discrimination against people based on their weight; “Splenda,” the brand name for the calorie-free sweetener sucralose; “copyleft,” an arrangement for the free distribution of material (as opposed to “copyright”); and “adultescent.”

Words fade away

Grant Barrett, lexicographer and editor of a word-watching website called Double-Tongued Word Wrester (www.double tongued.org), calls “chillax” -- a blend of “chill” and “relax” -- another word to watch in 2005.

But McKean says she’s not just interested in words that have been born but also in words that have died. The American Dialect Society’s word of the year was “information superhighway” in 1993 and “cyber-” in 1994. By now, both carry archaic notions of an outdated futurism.

McKean says we should shed no tears for these moribund words.

“If we really cared about them, we would have kept them,” she says. “They’re like an acquaintance that has dropped off the face of the Earth. They’re not cute, fuzzy pandas, with people trying to save them.”

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This article originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune.