Via Daily Writing Tips:

The Global Language Monitor (GLM) is an Austin, Texas-based entity that documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language and publishes a list of the year’s most used English words, names, and phrases.

According to GLM’s algorithm, 2009’s most used word, both online and in print, is Twitter.

GLM’s top ten for 2009:

Twitter
Obama
H1N1
stimulus
vampire
2.0 (as a suffix attached to the next generation of everything. Ex. Web2.0)
deficit
Hadron
healthcare
transparency

A look at the Words of the Year for 2000-2008 recalls the prominent events and personalities of those years:

2000 chad
2001 GroundZero
2002 misunderestimate
2003 embedded
2004 incivility
2005 refugee
2006 sustainable
2007 hybrid
2008 change

Taking the decade as a whole, here are the top ten words with GLC comments:

1. Global Warming (2000) Rated highly from Day One of the decade
2. 9/11 (2001) Another inauspicious start to the decade
3. Obama- (2008 )The US President’s name as a ‘root’ word or ‘word stem’
4. Bailout (2008) The Bank Bailout was but Act One of the crisis
5. Evacuee/refugee (2005) After Katrina, refugees became evacuees
6. Derivative (2007) Financial instrument or analytical tool that engendered the Meltdown
7. Google (2007) Founders misspelled actual word ‘googol’
Surge (2007) The strategy that effectively ended the Iraq War
9. Chinglish (2005) The Chinese-English Hybrid language growing larger as Chinese influence expands [There are an estimated 300 to 500 million users and/or learners of English in the People's Republic of China.]
10. Tsunami (2004) Southeast Asian Tsunami took 250,000 lives

To see the top phrases and names for 2009 and the first decade of the 21st century, explore the Global Language Monitor site.

Tags: 2009, deficit, H1N1, Hadron, healthcare, language, Obama, stimulus, transparency, Twitter, vampire, words, Words of the Decade, Words of the Year
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I had to start and stop this clip exactly one hundred times so I could read all the definitions. Wow, am I that unhip? I guess so…

Tags: Bay Area, hip hop, language, slang
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OK, he didn’t say babies, he said kittens. Last weekend I watched streaming video of The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM) 7 from Las Vegas (awesome conference and awesome technology) and was fascinated by a paper give by Steve Cuno of the Response Agency.

For those who may not know, TAM is the premiere skeptical conference, attracting hundreds of people from around the world to learn and socialize with other like-minded skeptics. “Skeptic” in the context refers to someone who applies critical thinking and scientific methodology to investigating things like crop circles, UFOs, Bigfoot, anti-vaccination scares, etc. It’s sometimes used as a synonym for “atheist”, but not all atheists are skeptics, and vice versa.

Anyway, Steve Cuno talked about the words “skeptic”, “humanist”, “atheist”, etc. and what they might mean to the average person. As with all labels, there are a lot of stereotypes floating around, so it’s not surprising that someone might really believe that skeptics are cold-hearted communists or that atheists eat kittens for breakfast. Cuno’s talk focused on how to lay positive groundwork first, so that people have good experiences before they encounter the label. Your neighbor sees you volunteering at the homeless shelter, and then learns you’re a skeptic – ah, maybe those skeptics are good people after all…

This rings true for me, since it’s an issue we encounter with naming all the time. Clients want a name that communicates all the good things about their product/company/service, a brand that will automatically make their customers feel all warm and fuzzy and trusting. But as we so often say, a good name can’t save a terrible product (just as a bad name can’t kill a wonderful product). Deliver a consistent, positive brand experience, and soon the name will become synonymous with the brand – and suddenly the name alone will carry all the brand associations on which you’ve been spending all your time and energy.

You can read a much-condensed version of Cuno’s talk here.

This has led me to think that I should conduct a naming project to come up with alternatives to “atheist” (I think “skeptic” is doing pretty well and we should leave it alone, except it should always be spelled with a “k” – you hear me, Britain and Australia?). Richard Dawkins and friends tried, disastrously, to rebrand atheists as “Brights” a few years ago, and honestly, I can’t think of a WORSE word. Arrogant? Check! Childishly cheerful? Check! Smugly superior? Double check!

Maybe I can do some online research and present the findings at TAM8.

Tags: atheist, labels, language, skeptic
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So…Mark Sanford. This isn’t a political blog, but we do read the news, and this particular scandal has now contributed a new euphemism to English – “hiking the Appalachian Trail”. Why Gov. Sanford thought this was a good excuse, I’ll never know, since he left a paper trail a mile long that gave away what he was really doing, i.e., seeing his mistress in Argentina. Whoops!

So the next time your sig other tells you they’re going hiking, especially if it’s on the Appalachian Trail, you might want to double check on that, see if they’re packing Clif bars, extra socks, a sleeping bag, etc. Although now that I think about it, those things work in either situation…

I love it when language changes right before your very eyes!

Note: this post is in no way meant to impugn the reputation of the actual Appalachian Trail, which is awesome and beautiful and one of our nation’s treasures. You should totally go hiking there, as long as you’re REALLY HIKING and not, you know, flying around the world on the taxpayer’s dime to see your secret lover. Cause that’s a really bad idea. Just ask Mark Sanford.

Tags: Appalachian Trail, euphemism, hiking euphemism, language
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I am a naming specialist, a linguist, and a lover of words in every sense. So I was tickled pink to see this recent collection of the 100 most beautiful words in English posted by AlphaDictionary.

Now of course, each of us will have our own opinion of what makes a word “beautiful” (Mr. Beard’s methodology is a bit mysterious), but I was encouraged to note that several of my personal favorites made the cut. For me, beauty in language is a combination of phonetics and semantics. I like words that sound nice AND have interesting, evocative, and/or inspirational meaning.

My personal favorite? Serendipity. I love the melodious wandering flow to this word – it’s borderline onomatopoeic – and the definition (”the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way”) speaks to both adventure and the benefits of taking the adventure. Pure magic.

In fact, as I look more closely at this list, quite a few of these words carry that same onomatopoeic feeling. Murmur, Dalliance, Fluke, Elixir, Nemesis … these words have more than a definition. They have emotion. Even if one doesn’t know the actual meaning, one can infer the intent of the word. Love that.

And I guess that’s why I’m in the naming business. The best brand names do more than just define the company or product they reference. They represent. They intrigue. They inspire. Catchword’s portfolio is rife with examples of such brand names: Dash, Zippity, Vudu, Maestro, et al. We take great pride in our ability to deliver such names to our clients. (And we’re proud to say that one client of ours will soon launch with a name on the list of the 100 most beautiful words. Can’t say which client or which word yet, but stay tuned.)

When trying to come up with a new name (whether you’re working with a professional naming consultant or just brainstorming on your own), don’t settle for ordinary. Your brand name is your first foot forward into the psyche of the consumer. Take the time to get it right. Take the time to find something that does what a brand name should do: represent, intrigue, inspire.

Tags: beautiful words, English, language
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We’d like to introduce a new series that will run every Friday, entitled There’s a Name For It. We love language, and this series features words from various languages around the world that capture universal, but complicated, human emotions or situations. It’s fun and (gasp!) educational, too!

We welcome your contributions!

Today’s lesson, perfect for a sunny Friday:

Fusha (Polish, FOO-hah, verb) — Using company time and resources for your own ends.

Source: They Have a Word for It, by Howard Rheingold.

Tags: fun words, Fusha, language, name of the week
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The excellent folks at Daily Writing Tips have weighed in on the question that’s on everyone’s mind: Should you pronounce the “h” in “-wh-“ words like whistle, whiz, and overwhelm?

DWT’s balanced response is very much in accord with my linguist colleague Laurel Sutton’s assertion that there is no “should” in the evolution of language.

Even so, those of us who pronounce the “h” may, just occasionally, continue to whine over “whine” over wine.

Tags: hw, language, linguistic analysis, linguistics, naming, wh
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In today’s San Francisco Chronicle (by Patricia Yollin):

Nzadi is one of the most obscure tongues in the world. That’s exactly why a UC Berkeley class has embraced it.

“There’s nothing like the joy of discovering a language from scratch,” said Cal linguistics Professor Larry Hyman.

The 10 students in his course, Introduction to Field Methods, are focusing on Nzadi this semester – the first such effort in any college or university to examine this remote member of the Bantu linguistic family.

“It’s a chance to study a language that nobody has studied before,” said graduate student researcher Thera Crane. “That opportunity does not come around very often.”

Nzadi is spoken by thousands of people in fishing villages along the Kasai River in Congo, a country with about 220 languages.

When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, I took this class; it’s a requirement on your way to getting a PhD. For me – and most of the other students, I think – it was one of the most fun and intense learning experiences we had. For the first time, we were actually doing field research: the class sits down with a native speaker and starts from scratch, asking for the most basic words, like “tree” and “nose” and “mother”. You have to transcribe the words, working to build up enough of a vocabulary to make simple sentences. I think this particular class is so lucky to get to analyze a previously “obscure” language (obscure to us in the West, certainly not to its native speakers in Africa).

My class was supposed to study a Tiberto-Burman language, but our informant eloped with her boyfriend right before classes started, and we ended up with Irish. Which was good for me, because Irish has palatalized consonants, and that formed the basis of my Master’s Thesis. I’m still going to prove that palatalized consonants in Japanese, Irish, and Russian are NOT the same. You just wait.

In the meantime, go UC Berkeley Linguistics Program! It’s what got me into naming in the first place.

Tags: African languages, language, linguistics
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