“Palinism” and “Obama-mess” are likely to be among the top global words of next year, as the US gears up for its next presidential elections, according to a language monitoring group.
The coming year will also likely be commonly deemed “Twenty-Eleven” as the English-speaking world moves away from disagreement over how to pronounce the first years of the decade, the Global Language Monitor said on Monday.
However, the “great recession” is expected to hang around next year as a well-used term while the world economy struggles to right itself.
“Palinism” has been around for a couple of years, used mostly to coin malapropisms from Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin, including her conflation “refudiate.”
According to the UrbanDictionary.com, “Palinism” is also sometimes defined as “other illogical stream of conscious meanderings uttered by Sarah Palin.”
Palin, who ran unsuccessfully for vice president in 2008 as a Republican and is now a conservative political activist, best-selling author and TV star, is pondering whether to run for US -president against US President Barack Obama in 2012.
Global Language Monitor president Paul Payack said Americans were thus likely to see and hear more of Palin next year, adding that “the media needs an heir to ‘Bushisms’ and Sarah Palin is the candidate of choice here.”
Payack said that “Obama-mess” is expected to be big next year.
“If Obama regains his magic, he escaped his Obama-mess; if his rating sinks further, he continues to be engulfed by it,” Payack said.
The Texas-based Global Language Monitor has gathered the Top 10 words at the end of each year since 2000, according to citations in the media and on the Internet from throughout the -English-speaking world.
“To project possible top words for 2011, we analyzed the categories that we monitor and then chose words from each representative of various world trends,” Payack said.
The top words of next year are:
1) Twenty-Eleven
2) Obama-mess
3) Great Recession
4) Palinism
5) TwitFlocker
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan