Dec 27th 2011, 13:24 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
IT'S that time of year. Fretting about pounds put on over the long holiday break. Throwing Christmas wrapping into the fire. Contemplating gift returns. Beginning to wonder how much you really needed a long break with your extended family (though I must say truthfully that my in-laws are dead easy to spend two weeks with). Wondering which New Year's party will be the best. (My tip: low expectations correlate strongly with fun New Year's Eves. Expectations for the Best Party Ever guarantee disappointment.)
It's also the time of the year when dictionary-writers and lexicographers pick a Word of the Year. I've admitted that I'm not a Word of the Day person, nor am I particularly a Word of the Year person, with a polite and apologetic tip of the hat to a Johnson friend, Ben Zimmer, the New Words supremo at the American Dialect Society. The reason I personally don't get too excited is just how rarely the winners tittilate. A neologism or new sense of a word catches on, unlike the many neologisms that didn't, and lexicographers ratify what everyone else already knew: that lots of people were saying "occupy" this year, or that in Britain, the "squeezed middle" was the top political catchphrase of 2011. Merriam-Webster, being a dictionary maker, picked a word that many people looked up on its website, and so went with "pragmatic" instead of "occupy". Nonetheless, "occupy" is the frontrunner to win the Oscar of WOTYs, that given by the American Dialect Society.
But WOTY season does give us a bit of time to talk about what a "word" is. Many people have objected to "squeezed middle" on the grounds that it is a tedious bit of political pandering. But others complain that it "isn't a word", but two words. Two words can be an ordinary phrase, as in "tall tree". Or they can become a compound, with a meaning above and beyond the compositional meaning of the two units. Last month Geoff Pullum wrote on Language Log that the Word of the Year "should be a word" and that "squeezed middle" was merely a compositional phrase. Mr Zimmer replied in rebuttal. So instead of being a Grinch about the WOTY business—I know many of you are wordniks, even if I'm not—I'll do a good turn and recommend this fascinating discussion about wordness.
It's also the time of the year when dictionary-writers and lexicographers pick a Word of the Year. I've admitted that I'm not a Word of the Day person, nor am I particularly a Word of the Year person, with a polite and apologetic tip of the hat to a Johnson friend, Ben Zimmer, the New Words supremo at the American Dialect Society. The reason I personally don't get too excited is just how rarely the winners tittilate. A neologism or new sense of a word catches on, unlike the many neologisms that didn't, and lexicographers ratify what everyone else already knew: that lots of people were saying "occupy" this year, or that in Britain, the "squeezed middle" was the top political catchphrase of 2011. Merriam-Webster, being a dictionary maker, picked a word that many people looked up on its website, and so went with "pragmatic" instead of "occupy". Nonetheless, "occupy" is the frontrunner to win the Oscar of WOTYs, that given by the American Dialect Society.
But WOTY season does give us a bit of time to talk about what a "word" is. Many people have objected to "squeezed middle" on the grounds that it is a tedious bit of political pandering. But others complain that it "isn't a word", but two words. Two words can be an ordinary phrase, as in "tall tree". Or they can become a compound, with a meaning above and beyond the compositional meaning of the two units. Last month Geoff Pullum wrote on Language Log that the Word of the Year "should be a word" and that "squeezed middle" was merely a compositional phrase. Mr Zimmer replied in rebuttal. So instead of being a Grinch about the WOTY business—I know many of you are wordniks, even if I'm not—I'll do a good turn and recommend this fascinating discussion about wordness.
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