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What we talked about in 2011

ideas | The Word

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December 18, 2011|By Ben Zimmer

Occupy: A protester in Spain wore a Guy Fawkes mask, symbolic of the hacktivist… (Susana Vera/Reuters )

Approaching the end of the year puts us all in a reflective mood. For word-watchers, it’s time to cast an eye back on the past 12 months, looking to see how the latest developments in our shared lexicon reveal something of the spirit of the time. Which words of 2011 were the zeitgeistiest?

The emergence of new words is fun to watch, and it can also tell us something deeper about the culture. What were we thinking and arguing about? What was significant enough to us that we needed to expand our linguistic palette just to accommodate it?

In any year, many of these additions to the language will be shiny new baubles lacking much staying power. Five months later, who still cares about carmageddon, the not-so-apocalyptic weekend in July when the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles was closed down? Even for language experts, it’s next to impossible to predict what will fade from the scene and what will linger on. Who would have guessed a year ago that a memoir about hyper-disciplined parenting, Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” would spark a national conversation about the pros and cons of tiger moms?

Over the next few weeks, the members of the American Dialect Society will be mulling over these questions in advance of anointing a Word of the Year on Jan. 6. I’m the chair of the society’s New Words Committee, which means I have the privilege of wrangling the assembled crowd of scholars as they spiritedly argue for their Word of the Year choices, as well as a variety of other categories, such as Most Creative, Most Useful, Most Outrageous, Most Euphemistic, and Most Likely to Succeed.

What words are in contention in 2011? The official list of finalists won’t be drafted until we’ve all gathered at our annual meeting in Portland, Ore. But this year, heading into the final stretch, casual handicappers agree that the odds-on favorite is occupy, an old word invested with new meanings thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy spread like wildfire over the last few months, serving as a kind of self-fulfilling organizing principle for protests over financial inequalities, as well as a terse rallying cry for the demonstrators’ experiments in “participatory democracy.” Proof of just how entrenched occupy has become can be found in the innumerable parodies: Occupy Sesame Street, Occupy Lego Land, Occupy Uranus, Occupy My Couch.