Red, blog, and blue
WHAT WORDS WERE we using in 2004? Merriam-Webster knows: Its list of the year's Top 10 terms is not a committee's inventive effort but a dispassionate tally of lookups in its online dictionaries and thesaurus (m-w.com). And though blog ranks No. 1, politics and war are predictably dominant: Incumbent, electoral, insurgent, partisan, and sovereignty are all on the list.
Even blog, though it's a computer term, probably owes its top spot to politics. It's been around since 1999 (and its parent, weblog, since 1997), but blog had a banner year in 2004. Presidential candidates blogged, fundraisers showed that blogging brought big bucks, and bloggers brought down Dan Rather, demonstrating that ''60 Minutes'' had failed to investigate whether documents used in its story on President Bush's military record were authentic.
The nonpolitical words all seem logical, too -- hurricane, cicada, peloton (the pack in the Tour de France) -- till we hit No. 10, defenestration. Was somebody important thrown out a window in another English-speaking country? Or did somebody's fifth-grade class decide to put a word on the M-W list through dogged repetition? (No, scratch that: A fifth-grade class would have chosen something more daring than defenestration.)
Political terms also led the pack at the American Dialect Society's annual words-of-the year vote, held earlier this month at the group's meeting in Oakland, Calif. The overall winner, as well as Most Likely to Succeed, was the trio red state, blue state, purple state -- the colors of the standard electoral map plus the purple of the more fine-tuned versions that followed.
Blog would have been old news at ADS (www.americandialect.org) whose members named it Most Likely to Succeed two years ago. But the blogosphere was winningly represented by the Most Creative word of 2004, pajamahadeen, or ''bloggers who challenge and fact-check traditional media.'' The coinage, attributed to Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, was provoked by ex-CBS executive Jonathan Klein, who appeared on ''The O'Reilly Factor,'' as Rathergate loomed, to defend traditional newsgathering.
Big news organizations, Klein claimed, have ''checks and balances,'' while the typical blogger has few resources -- he's just ''a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.'' Within days, a new word was born, and political bloggers -- including those who wear bow ties when typing -- were embracing their new image as guerrillas of the keyboard, tough tribesmen of the pajamahadeen.
The folks at YourDictionary.com like pajamahadeen too; in fact, it's a bonus word, No. 11 on the 2004 Top 10. But there's more, much more, on this multi-list collection: we'll skip over slang words and numbers and merely note that with words and phrases on separate lists, there's plenty of room for politics, starting with inCivility. This coinage (not credited) for some reason caught the eye of the YD staff, which links it to the shrill political ''dis-coarse'' of the past year, but the unpunny usual suspects are also here: red/blue, flip-flopping, Fahrenheit (as in ''9/11''), liberal, Swift boats, moral values, two Americas, angry Left, even ''girlie men''; this seems more like reliving the year than summarizing it. YD's weird word is esrever (reverse reversed), a tip of the hat to Red Sox Nation and another reason to be thankful for the World Series win: The curse is gone, and soon esrever will be too.
Lake Superior State University, which started its word list in 1976 (www.lssu.edu/banished), has always taken a cranky attitude toward the annual exercise: It asks not just for words of the year but for words contributors want to see ''banished'' from the language. Of course, the words we're sick of and the words that encapsulate the year are often the same; LSSU's watchdogs agree with other observers on the prevalence of red/blue and flip-flop, but they come not to praise but to bury them.
Every year, though, I'm surprised anew at the university's willingness to record votes from correspondents languishing in darkest ignorance. Sure, lists like this are just for fun, but should blog be publicly shunned when, as the editors note, ''Many who nominated it were unsure of the meaning''? (''Maybe it's something that would be stuck in my toilet,'' one wag guesses.) Carbs got a thumbs down, too -- ''Meant carburetor in a previous life,'' someone comments. Well, duh -- it's the same carb, derived from the carbon that fuels both cars and bodies. Instead of rewarding doltishness, maybe LSSU could post a gentle caution to contributors: Really, it's bad form to blackball a word you haven't met.
E-mail freeman@globe.com.
