Word of the year

In case you missed the news, or any of several blog entries on the topic, "blog" has been named Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year!

This might be fine and dandy if it reflected buzz in old media newsrooms (as it probably does), but the world of the year is determined by online look-ups! That's right -- the net-surfing public is only this year discovering that blogs exist. Egad! (Allow me to take this moment to declare that my blogging experience goes way back to 2001 and that I've been doing the web page thing since, well, I don't want to date myself.)

The BBC notes that Oxford wasn't so slow on the uptake:

However, the word is already included in some printed versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

A spokesman for the Oxford University Press said that the word was now being put into other dictionaries for children and learners, reflecting its mainstream use.

"I think it was the word of last year rather than this year," he said.

"Now we're getting words that derive from it such as 'blogosphere' and so on," he said.

Those hip Brits.

Feministe points out that "defenestration" made the list at number ten, and I, too, have loved that word since the '80s. (Oops - now I have dated myself.) But what about these other words? When I think of the last election, and consider that online Americans were looking up such obscure words as:

...I start to worry about the state of our republic.

(And what's with those lubbers who had to look up "hurricane"??? Don't they watch TV? Maybe not. We can hope.)

-media girl