Word of the Year 2012

The words of the year won’t necessarily find themselves in an Oxford Dictionary anytime soon – many will be far too new or ephemeral – but that isn’t really the point. Instead, we are able to focus on the new additions to our vocabulary each year that have been influenced by popular culture, sport, politics, and other current affairs.

Without further ado, though, let’s look at 2012’s UK & US Word of the Year.

Ta dah! And the winner is. . .

USA Word Of The Year 2012

The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned 25 this year, but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier. GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2012, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun. The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace.

GIF is an acronym from graphic interchange format, coined as a noun in 1987. Verbs are often created from nouns in this way in English, ranging from venerable words such as to blanket and to fork to other recent technology neologisms like to Google and to Photoshop.

GIF may be pronounced with either a soft g (as in giant) or a hard g (as in graphic).GIF is usually spelled in all capitals in its uninflected form, but the addition of verbal endings presents problems.The most common form features GIF in capitals but the inflected endings in lowercase (GIFed, GIFing), so that is the spelling we have chosen to use here.

UK Word Of The Year

Omnishambles! Coined by the writers of the satirical television programme The Thick Of It, an omnishambles is a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.
Why omnishambles? Well, it was a word everyone liked, which seemed to sum up so many of the events over the last 366 days in a beautiful way. It’s funny, it’s quirky, and it has broken free of its fictional political beginnings, firstly by spilling over into real politics, and then into other contexts. If influence is any indication of staying power, it has already staked its claim by being linguistically productive in its own right, producing a number of related coinages. While many of them are probably humorous one-offs, their very existence shows that the omnishambles itself has entered at least the familiar parlance, if not quite the common parlance. And for every Romneyshambles(coined in the UK to describe US presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s doubts that London had what it took to host a successful Olympic Games) and omnivoreshambles (detailing the furore over the proposed badger cull in England and Wales) there is the far more sober adjective omnishambolic.

Other Words Shortlisted In this Year

1. YOLO: you only live once; typically used as rationale or endorsement for impulsive or irresponsible behavior

2. Nomophobia: anxiety caused by being without one’s mobile phone [from no+ mo(bile) + phobia]

3. Higgs boson: a subatomic particle whose existence is predicted by the theory that unified the weak and electromagnetic interactions

4. Second screening: the practise or activity of watching television while simultaneously using a smartphone, tablet computer, laptop, or other screen device.

5. Eurogeddon: the potential financial collapse of the European Union countries that have adopted the euro,[from EURO and (ARMA)GEDDON].

6. Pleb: especially one regarded as being of low social status.[from Latin plebs ‘the common people’]

7. Mobot: a characteristic gesture as performed by the British long-distance runner Mo Farah on winning the 5,000 and 10,000 metres events at the 2012 Olympics, in which both arms are arched above the head with the hands pointing down to the top of the head to form a distinctive ’M’ shape,[blend of Mo (diminutive of ‘Mohamed’) and ROBOT]