Technically speaking the decade isn’t yet over. However, that hasn’t stopped the American Dialect Society from declaring that ‘google’ is the word of the decade. The American Dialect Society is a scholarly association dedicated to the study of English language in North America, which is apparently more than a century old.
Why should we bother about the findings of a society which doesn’t even know how to count years? Well, there is no real reason. Anyway, the society selected ‘tweet’ (noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message) as the word of the year and google’ (a generic form of Google,meaning to search the Internet) as the word of the decade. Other nominees for the world of the decade included ‘blog’, ’9/11′ and ‘Wi-Fi’.
‘Fail’ (a noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful) was selected the most useful, while ‘Dracula Sneeze’ (covering one’s mouth with the crook of one’s elbow when sneezing, seen as similar to popular portrayals of the vampire Dracula, in which he hides the lower half of his face with a cape) was adjudged the most creative.
Other categories included most unnecessary, most euphemistic, most outrageous and least likely to succeed words. Go ahead and check out the full report if you like useless fun stats.
