While Twitter users busied their fingers last week with tweets about the American Dialect Society’s selection of “Google” as word of the decade, English professor Donka Minkova, a member of the society for 25 years, lamented the fate of a word she believes should have been a contender: Sudoku, the popular Japanese number puzzle.
“Sudoku came into the language after the turn of the millennium, and I think it’s very much part of the everyday language now, whether one is addicted to it or not,” the English professor said.
Everyone has his or her own choice, but last week, the American Dialect Society gave the decade nod to “Google” and named “tweet” the word of 2009.
Grant Barrett, chair of the society’s New Words Committee, called the selections “indicative of the rise of the Information Age” and reflective of the availability of information “for every man, every woman, every person.”
The 121-year-old group of linguists and lexicographers, which studies the evolution of the English language and other dialects in North America, chose both words by holding a voting session.
Minkova, who has been involved in the voting process in years past, described the voting process as informal, a kind of days-long inside joke among linguists and others in the field.
“There’s a lot of banter back and forth and people suggest funny things,” she said. “The voting doesn’t have much scientific value. It’s kind of popular impression of which words were most salient,” she said.
This year, the Web-based words won the wordsmiths over.
Craig Melchert, a professor of linguistics, said he isn’t surprised by the choice of the oft-used words “Google” and “tweet,” though he said he believes “blog” would have been just as worthy for the decade title.
“Information technology is one of the fast-changing areas of life and therefore, predictably, it’s the biggest source of new words and new usages,” said Melchert, who uses Google in verb form with one caveat: “Since it’s now an ordinary verb, I refuse to capitalize it.”
Minkova, who can expound enthusiastically on words from years of teaching a course in the structure of English words, said the choice of “tweet” is significant for reasons beyond it being indicative of recent technological leaps.
“It’s a word without any etymology. It has no history longer than a century and a half, which as far as words go, is very, very young,” she said. “It’s also an onomatopoeic word, so it’s sound-imitative of the sound that birds do.”
Russell Schuh, a professor of linguistics, found the American Dialect Society’s choice in both “tweet” and “Google” predictable and lacking in imagination.
“‘Tweet,’ for example, was cooked up by the users of Twitter as a cute name for a message using this system ““ cute because it already exists in another meaning that sort of evokes the brevity and amount of content of a “tweet” on Twitter,” he said.
“But what impact does this have on the English language? It’s pretty limited to the admittedly fairly large number of people who use Twitter, but there are millions of speakers of English who do not and probably never will,” he said, adding that the choice of Google as a verb is a miss since “basically any noun can be converted to a verb in English.”
Whether they’re converting Web site names to verbs or clipping “application” to form “app,” Minkova pays attention to the word tailoring done by speakers.
To illustrate one pervasive trend, affixing a suffix to a word to create a portmanteau, or a blended word, Minkova recalled the Internet debate that ensued over what to coin the collective blog world.
“You had blogmos from cosmos and blogiverse from universe. The trend is creating new words from existing elements,” she said. “Some of them start out as jokes, some are trade names like Google. Some of them just revive an existing word and use them in new ways,” she said, before listing some of her favorites.
Someone who’s bombarded with information might be suffering from fact-igue (“fact” and “fatigue”), and an angsty 40-something in skinny jeans stuck in arrested development might be called an “adultescent” (“adult” and “adolescent”).
Melchert, too, said he is continually struck by the inventiveness of the English speaker and the new words they drum up.
“I like “˜blends’ ““ brunch, smog. Language change is natural and inevitable. It is not decay, as many purists want to make it.”
Minkova admits to attempting her own word coinage, a habit she said is shared among college professors and children alike.
“I do it all the time. You can always create a word on the fly ““ that would be a “˜fly-ation,'” she said.
To emphasize the fluidity of language, Minkova said she encourages students in her English words course to come up with their own original words.
“I generally think that language should be allowed to just happen and it happens in usage,” she said. “It’s in the heads and mouths of speakers. It’s not the property of professors or higher authorities. I don’t like that higher authority thing.”