ADS Word of the Year: #blacklivesmatter

10 January 2015

The American Dialect Society has voted on its Word of the Year for 2014, choosing the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, which became the rallying cry on Twitter and other social media outlets for those protesting the failure to obtain indictments against the police officers who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York. It is the first time the ADS has chosen a hashtag as its Word of the Year. The word hashtag itself was the society’s choice for 2012.

(In past years I have participated in the nomination and voting for Word of the Year, but not this year.)

Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal highlighted how hashtags can succinctly encapsulate a social or political message, saying, “Language scholars are paying attention to the innovative linguistic force of hashtags, and #blacklivesmatter was certainly a forceful example of this in 2014.”

The ADS has traditionally adopted a broad definition of word in its selection, including not only such things as hashtags, but phrases, prefixes, suffixes, and any “vocabulary item.”

#blacklivesmatter was the overwhelming choice, with 196 votes. The runner-up with eleven votes was columbusing, a term for cultural appropriation, especially by a white person from a minority culture. Even, as in the phrase I can’t even, garnered five votes, as did manspreading, a word that describes the habit of some men to sit on public transit with legs open to block others from sitting in adjacent seats.

Even was the society’s choice for the Most Useful of 2014, though, with 133 votes. Runners-up with the vote counts were:

  • budtender: a person who works at a legal marijuana outlet (69)

  • unbothered: the state of not being annoyed or distracted (15)

  • Ebola: the virus that killed thousands in West Africa and created baseless hysteria in the U.S. (9)

  • robocar: a self-driving car (7)

The word voted Most Creative was columbusing, with 158 votes. Runners-up:

  • manspreading (44)

  • narcissistick: another name for a stick used for taking selfies (22)

  • misoynoir: misogyny directed at a black woman (8)

The verb to second-amendment, meaning to kill someone with a gun, was voted as Most Outrageous, with 192 votes. Runners-up:

  • God view: the display mode that allows employees of the car-sharing service Uber to see real-time information on all users (11)

  • sugar-dating: a relationship between an older, wealthier person and a younger, poorer one (6)

No term initially won a majority for the category of Most Euphemistic, entailing a run-off. The abbreviation EIT, for enhanced interrogation technique, which itself is a euphemism for torture, eventually won with 108 and then 139 votes. The other contenders were:

  • conscious uncoupling: an amicable breakup or divorce (84/103)

  • bye, Felicia: a dismissive farewell, taken from a line in the 1995 movie Friday (30)

  • thirsty: desperate for a romantic partner (13)

The Most Likely to Succeed nod went to salty, meaning exceptionally bitter or angry, with 78 votes in the first round and 131 in the second. Runners-up:

  • basic: plain, socially awkward, uncool (58/89)

  • selfie stick (48)

  • budtender (44)

  • plastiglomerate: a material made from melted plastic, sand, and organic debris (10)

  • casual: a new or inexperienced person, especially a gamer (7)

Platisher, a term for n online media publisher, was voted Least Likely to Succeed with 173 votes. Runners-up:

  • pairage: a term proposed by a conservative politician for same-sex marriages (53)

  • normcore: the fashion trend of wearing cheap, off-the-rack clothing brands (15)

A new category for 2014 was the Most Notable Hashtag, won by #blacklivesmatter, with 226 votes. Runners-up:

  • #icantbreathe: formed from the last words of Eric Garner (14)

  • #notallmen: used by men in discussions about misogyny and sexual violence against women (1)

  • #whyistayed: used by women in discussions about abusive relationships

Strong Language

19 December 2014

There’s a new blog in town, one aimed at “language geeks to talk about things they can’t talk about in more polite contexts.” Specifically, the blog Strong Language is all about vulgarities.

Strong Language is the brainchild of linguist James Harbeck and editor Stan Carey, who each have their own excellent language blogs. The blog also features contributions from other writers about language.

Posts in the first week of the blog’s existence have included a discussion of some of Francis Grose’s more salacious notes that never made it into any of the print editions of his eighteenth-century slang dictionary, a piece by Ben Zimmer on the shit-ins of the 1960s, and a post on dog excrement in medieval Ireland.

So if you like words and aren’t easily offended, check it out.

English 3.0

24 November 2014

Joe Gilbert has created English 3.0, a twenty-minute documentary on the state of the English language, featuring the likes of Tom Chatfield, David Crystal, Robert McCrum, Fiona McPherson and Simon Horobin

It’s quite good. One comment mentioned by several of those interviewed that I have my doubts about concerns the “revolution” in language due to the internet. The claim is that the language is changing faster than ever. I’m not so sure that is true. Rather, we may simply be noticing the change more. People are coining (and abandoning) new words at the same rate they always have. But now with the internet, we see them, where before the new coinage was confined to a small coterie of the coiner’s friends and acquaintances. The impact on lexicography is the danger that these words will be ephemeral and the dictionary will become filled with obsolescent coinages that had a brief flash of existence—words that never would have risen to the attention of lexicographer fifty years ago because they died too quickly.

(Tip o’ the Hat to Stan Carey over at the Sentence First blog.

Women in the Guardian

17 October 2014

Maddie York, an editor at The Guardian, has penned an article for that paper’s “Mind Your Language Blog” in which she objects to the use of woman as an adjective, as in woman doctor or woman writer. The subheading for the blog post—which York may not have written, as headlines are often not written by the reporter—reads:

‘Woman’ is not an acceptable adjective, any more than ‘lady’ once was. Let’s eradicate this misuse and give language a nudge in the right direction.

But this general proscription is just wrong. There is nothing, and never has been anything, wrong with using woman as an adjective.

As justification for her pronouncement York points to The Guardian’s style guide, which says:

woman, women
are nouns, not adjectives, so say female president, female MPs etc rather than “woman president”, “women MPs”

Of course, The Guardian is within its rights to prefer female over woman; female doctor and female writer are perfectly good phrases, and if that is how the paper wants its writers to write, so be it. But that doesn’t mean that woman isn’t an acceptable adjective for the rest of us. It’s not a misuse that needs eradicating.

York states, incorrectly, that the adjectival use of the word is becoming more common in recent years. The fact is that woman has been used adjectivally since the Middle English period. The earliest citation in the OED of woman as adjective is from a Wycliffite translation of the Bible from before 1382, which renders 3 Kings 17:9 as “a womman widuwe.” (The 1611 Authorized (King James) version flips it, rendering 1 Kings 17:9 as “a widow woman.” Note that some versions of the Bible label the two books of Samuel as 1 Kings and 2 Kings. So what is 1 Kings in some versions is called 3 Kings in others.) But there are even earlier uses known. The Ancrene Riwle, a monastic rulebook for women written prior to 1200, has in at least one manuscript—Cambridge Corpus Christi College 402, copied around 1230—the following:

For swuch ah wummone lare to beonne luuelich & liðe & selthwenne sturne.
(For such a woman teacher to be kind and gentle and seldom harsh.)

Nor is the attributive use limited to centuries past, but has continued through the ages, with writers like Dryden, Pope, and Dickens using woman as the first element in a hyphenated noun, such as “woman-warrior” or “woman-doctor.” Others have used it as a straight-up adjective, like Fynes Moryson who in 1671 described Sappho as a “woman poet,” or Matthew Prior who in 1706 wrote of Queen Anne, “the Woman Chief is Master of the War,” or The Guardian itself which disregarded its own rule in 1979 and described Margaret Thatcher as “Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.”

So neither history nor current usage, which seems to find nothing wrong in the adjectival use of woman, is on the side of a general proscription.

York is also incorrect in analogizing this usage to the decline of lady. The objections to that word’s use isn’t because of any adjectival use, but rather because lady is a word laden with sexist overtones and connotations about appropriate gender roles, connotations that woman did not carry.

So if you want to use woman as an adjective, feel free to do so—that is, so long as the style guide for the publication you’re writing for finds it acceptable. If you prefer female, that’s fine too. Just don’t try to foist your preference onto others. And don’t use either one when you don’t have to. Only call out the fact that a person is a woman when the context demands a distinction between women and men. If the sex of the person isn’t material to the subject at hand, she is simply a doctor or police officer, not a woman doctor or woman officer.

Sources:

“lady,” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, 582–83.

“woman, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2011

“womman (n.),” Middle English Dictionary, 2001.