Even the American Dialect Society knows how risky home mortgages are these days.
The group of wordsmiths chose "subprime" as last year's Word of the Year at its annual convention on Friday.
"Subprime has been around with bankers for awhile, but now everyone is talking about subprime," said Wayne Glowka, a spokesman for the group and a dean at Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia. "It's affecting all kinds of people in all kinds of places."
About 80 members of the organization spent two days debating the merits of "Facebook," "green," "Googleganger" and "waterboarding" before voting for an adjective that means "a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage or investment."
The choice signifies the public's concern for a "deepening mortgage crisis," the society said in a statement.
Facebook, as a noun, verb or adjective, was popular with younger linguists, Glowka said.
GREEN LOBBY
Several people lobbied for green, which "designates environmental concern," but the term has been around for years, he said.
The word topped last year's "Most Useful" category, one of numerous subgroups the society chooses.
The group also decided that although waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, gained a lot of attention during recent attorney general confirmation hearings, it was a bigger deal in 2004, Glowka said.
But what's a Googleganger?
A play on doppelganger, the word is "a person with your name who shows up when you Google yourself," the society said.
Glowka said he assessed many Google-related words.
GOOGLING GOOGLE
"Just Google `Google' and you'll turn them up," he said.
The ghostly double of a word won last year's "Most Creative" designation.
As for subprime, Glowka said it is an odd word -- at least as far as linguists are concerned.
The prefix "sub" translates roughly to "below the standard," while "prime" means something close to "the best."
So, according to Glowka, the word really means "far below the best."
The American Dialect Society, founded in 1889, comprises linguists, grammarians, historians and scholars, among others.
The society began choosing words of the year in 1990 for fun, not in an official capacity to induct words into the English language.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees
RSS