FYI: Tombits… It’s the word of the year and that’s how long it’ll last

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/12/2009 (6027 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VARIOUS groups each year pick a new "word of the year" to mark the evolution of the English language. Oxford English Dictionary is perhaps pre-eminent among them, but others, such as American Dialect Society, like to have their say as well.

This year Oxford picked "unfriend" as its word of the year for 2009. Unfriend, in case you don’t already know, is a verb, and it involves the heartless act of "removing someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook," the lexicographers at the OED tell us. "It has both currency and potential longevity," Oxford’s senior American lexicographer says, and the folks at the American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster’s, another publisher of dictionaries agree — they, too, picked unfriend as the word of the year for 2009.

"Unfriend," they said, "has real lex-appeal." Lex-appeal is too clever by half, but it is a more likely candidate for word of the year, or the decade, than unfriend, which somehow doesn’t seem destined for a really big place in American, English, or Canadian vocabularies.

The word of the year often does not, in fact, have lex-appeal. "Mom" made it in 1996, even though it had been around and commonly used for as long as there has been an English language. What do lexicographers call their own mothers?

Metrosexual was the pick in 2003, and who has heard that lately? Does anyone even know what a purple state is — that was the choice in 2004 — and millennium bug (1997) has been hardly heard since then.

Fortunately, those who don’t subscribe to silly services such as Facebook, where people freely embarrass themselves, can’t be unfriended, metrosexualized or millennium bugged. Maybe that’s why we can’t get dates — no lex-appeal.