Ephemera transatlantica: a Word in your Year

Did you notice that the American Dialect Society celebrated its 20th 'Word of the Year' obsession last week? Almost as inspiring as TIME's Person of the Year annual Christmas filler. (Yeah, you'd have missed that too had not Alan Wylie given Ben Bernanke a bit of a kicking a month ago.)

I'll bet you've long forgotten, if you ever noticed, bushlips=bullshit (1990) - after Bush Snr on tax.
Some on HOL, in case their heavy irony be taken for naivete, still fall back on '.... NOT!'(1992) - and I'm sure 'Doh!' got a listing somewhere in the '90s too.

'Subprime' (2007) may survive, no matter how many bankers become Time pinups, but 'Y2K'(1999) was always in for a short shelf life even if our brave new world had succumbed to the 'millennium bug'(1997) by midnight 31.12.99 - sorry, 12/31.

Alas, the brave new world survived so 'the Web'(1995) became Word of the Decade (Jan'00) and then '9/11' came along to americanis/ze us all('01).

Then just when I was taking some small comfort from wondering when I'd last heard that hubristic 'Information Superhighway' mouthful (1993), I read in yesterday's Irish Times that 'google' (verb) is Word of the Decade, and Word of the Year'09 - TWEET.

And to think that 'dialect' is what my city classmates used twit me with when I trudged in to boarding school from my border townland, but which I later wore proudly as a badge of authenti-city.

I fear not even Beijing can do much about 'google' - and since up to 140 HOL characters are keeping on twittering the end may be in sight with the Last Trump replaced by a tweet. Now my brother-in-law in Winnipeg persuades me we can no longer communicate without 'skype' - invented by a young Esthonian, I'm told, back in the dim and distant past of 2003. A good kick up the baltics would have been in order.