We asked our regular blog contributors this final question in 2011:

What word sums up 2011 for you and why?

A brand-new word perhaps, or a well-used one throughout the year. Or perhaps a word that is particularly relevant to your experience of the year.

Here are some of the answers to the question:

It’s a gloomy one, but I’d have to say the word austerity. In the context of economic meltdown and us all having to ‘do our bit’ to redress the financial misdemeanours of the past few years, the meaning of austerity has in 2011 made the journey from relatively obscure, extreme situation of unpleasantness to a generally accepted scenario which governments, a bit like disciplining an unruly teenager, seem to be suggesting we should jolly well put up with and swallow like cod liver oil – tastes nasty but will do you good in the long run …
Kerry Maxwell

My word of the year – and really, of the decade – is inequality. While the divide between the rich and the poor and middle class has been soaring for years now in America, the problem has only recently been highlighted by the media, and thus entered the broader public debate.  Inequality of wealth is one of the central defining features of our age. Where I live, in New York City,  the median household income is now only $48,743, five percent lower than 2007. Fully 75,000 more New Yorkers fell below the meager federal poverty line ($18,310 for a family of three) this year than last, marking the largest yearly hike in two decades. The total population of poor New Yorkers is now 1.6 million, equaling one in five residents. Yet according to the my organization’s  analysis of Forbes data, the 57 billionaires now living in New York City have a net worth of $211 billion, an $11 billion increase in the last year alone. Their net worth now equals the annual income of over four million average New York City families, or 14 million people working full-time at a minimum wage salary. The fact that 57 people now have as much money as 14 full-time workers is nothing short of obscene.  I am still a committed capitalist, and still believe in the opportunity that allowed my grandparents to build a better life for their children and grandchildren through hard work. But it has never been clearer that today’s distorted crony capitalism needs to be reformed to once again ensure everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a shot at the American dream.
Still, I have problems with the word inequality because it implies that its opposite is equality, which some may falsely interpret to mean some sort of socialist system in which everyone is promised equal outcomes. I don’t believe in equal outcomes, merely equal opportunity. So perhaps the word of the year should be a new word – inopportunity – which should be balanced by a new societal focus on “opportunity.”
Joel Berg from New York City Coalition Against Hunger

Techaplenty – yeah, it’s not really a word. I just made it up to describe my 2011. I’ve been learning a lot of about mobile devices and editing software this year because I think some interesting ebooks and apps for English language teaching might be just around the corner. And if that’s true, maybe 2012 will be a techabundant.
Vicki Hollett

My vote goes to occupy – not a new word, not even a new meaning (students used to occupy campus buildings back in the 1970s), but a new phenomenon in the present century. There’s a temptation for old curmudgeons like myself to think the younger generation is only interested in celebrities, consumerism, and reality TV, but I’m pleased to have been proved wrong by the growth of the Occupy Movement (which made a big enough impact on the news to become one of our BuzzWords). Partly inspired by the Arab Spring protests and the Indignados in Spain, the movement represents grassroots opposition to what is seen as the control over public policy exerted by banks and big corporations – which led to the inequalities highlighted here by Joel Berg. (I’ve just read that the top ten US CEO’s earned almost $800 million between them last year…)
Michael Rundell

Word: Jobs. Cheating a bit here with a proper noun but jobs (lack of) have also dominated the news cycle. As an Apple person since the Dawn of Time I have increasingly had mixed feelings about my tribe – the products are beautiful but over-priced, the fans embarrassingly smug (yes, you Mr Fry!). It also hard to warm to a founder who declared ‘thermo-nuclear war’ on a competitor (Google). But where would I be without my iPod and my Mac Mini? And why do I want to squander £400 on a tablet that shuts out the latest BBC iPlayer?
Kieran McGovern from eslreading

My word of the year is Higgs Boson. It’s two words, so will incur the wrath of Geoff Pullum, but that’s a risk I’ll have to take. Scientists (obviously if this were a British newspaper I’d have written “boffins”) at CERN now say they have seen a hint of this elusive particle, and assembled a press conference to make the announcement. This being 2011, the event was simultaneously being tweeted from the seminar room, with such eye-opening tweets as this: #ATLAS sees a small excess at a Higgs mass of 126 GeV coming from 3  channels. Local significance: 3.6 sigma but only 2.4 sigma globally. I think that just about says it all, really.
Stephen Bullon

How about you? What word ‘defines’ 2011 for you?

As the year ends, lexicographers and other word geeks traditionally put their heads together to choose or vote for a word of the year (WOTY). It’s not that simple, of course: different groups pick different words in different ways for different reasons. And it’s not always a word – other “vocabulary items” like phrases and parts of words are generally allowed.

Words of the Year can be new or newly prominent or significant. They’re like annual trending topics, pointing to wider concerns in society, and it can be fun to follow the suggestions and the debates over which ones deserve recognition and why. A handy way to do this is through the #woty or #woty11 hashtags on Twitter.

Some have already been named: polls at TIME and Dictionary.com elected occupy and tergiversate, respectively, while Merriam-Webster went with pragmatic and Oxford Dictionaries chose squeezed middle. Occupy is also a strong candidate for the American Dialect Society’s WOTY, which in recent years has come from the areas of technology (tweet, app) and economics (subprime, bailout).

The Society’s event includes categories such as most useful, creative, unnecessary, outrageous, and euphemistic. You can see why it appeals to people who don’t just use words but track them, study them, and adore them.

I like Arab Spring and humblebrag, but occupy occupies my top spot this year. Initially a rallying cry for protestors in Wall Street, it spread rapidly to become a worldwide movement in which the word itself “shaped the perception of important events”, as Geoff Nunberg wrote at NPR. A clear sign of its cultural penetration and versatility is the appearance of so many parodies, like Occupy Sesame Street.

Occupy retains its principal transitive senses of “use a place” and “take or have control of a place”, which is essentially what activists have done with public space to voice their displeasure over economic inequality and related issues. But the word has developed an unexpected intransitive use: now you can just occupy, meaning participate in an Occupy protest.

In her BuzzWord article in October, Kerry Maxwell revealed that occupy’s former use “as a euphemism for ‘have sexual relations with’ [caused] it to fall out of general usage until the late 18th century”. Ben Zimmer, in “Occupying Word Street”, writes that the protest-related sense appeared in 1920, and through this route occupy has gained a new lease of life.

A subsequent article by Mr Zimmer discusses some of this year’s other main contenders, including nymwars and winning. All are linguistically interesting; but for me, occupy occupies.

Continuing the tradition established over the last couple of years, we are bringing you a list of blog posts published over here on the Macmillan Dictionary Blog which have been read and commented on most widely.

Many of the selected 10 plus 2 additional posts still have ongoing conversations – have a read and join in by commenting.

So roll out the red carpet … Here they come: the most popular posts in 2011.

Our most popular blog posts in 2011

Perhaps not surprisingly, the ‘What’s Your English?’ 2011 campaign-starting blog post was the most popular: Goodbye 2010. Hello 2011 … and round 2!
The post includes a video (with script) of a rap battle between Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman and British emcee Professor Elemental.

Halfway through the year, the most talked about green BuzzWords also proved popular with readers. What were they? Well, here they are: Top 20 green buzzwords in English

In the second round of our world tour of Englishes in 2011, the topic of ‘small talk’ was one that stirred up most interest and discussion, particularly these posts by various guest bloggers:

Top of the morning to yourself
by Stan Carey

Is small talk different in the US and UK? Yes!
by Vicki Hollett

Accidental drifting – small talk in the UK
by Lynne Murphy

Small talk is no small matter
by Stan Carey

Business English, subcultural English, gender and class English were also much talked about:

The bottom line on trickle-down
by Janet Gough

Walking the talk – part one
by John Allison

Street slang – the dodgy-looking geezer
by Dan Clayton

Getting cute about gender
by Stan Carey

What’s a nice girl like you doing in a dictionary like this?
by Michael Rundell

Talking like common people
by Dan Clayton

Most popular posts in 2009 and 2010

To see what our readers found interesting to read and comment on in previous years, see these links:
Most popular in 2009
Most popular in 2010

We’re delighted to launch the Macmillan Dictionary Love English Awards 2011 for best blog and best website about the English language.

For details of the competition – how you can nominate and vote, and what the prizes are – check out this page over on Macmillan Dictionary.

You can nominate your chosen website and/or blog until 15th January 2012.

Voting ends on 31st January 2012.

Start nominating and voting now!

“What prospects are there for us post the proposals to tackle banana fraud?”

If you read this sentence at normal speed – and without my having drawn attention to it – you might have come briefly unstuck by thinking it has something to do with posting proposals. More careful examination shows that this is a red herring that results from post being used as a lone preposition in place of after (or maybe the writer meant concerning, regarding, in light of or some such phrase).

Subeditor Cathy Relf wrote about this line (with minor changes made for discretion) on her Ranting Subs blog. The usage of post caught her eye, as it did mine, and has done before. She wonders if the writer believed that after was “a bit too dull, straightforward and English”: maybe they wanted, unhelpfully, to “[jazz] things up with a bit of Latin”.

Post meaning after is a useful prefix whose use in moderation is unobjectionable (e.g., post-natal, post-production, post-dated cheque, post-9/11 security measures). But using it as a standalone substitute for after is in some circumstances likely to invite miscues and force readers to reconsider what they’ve just read. They will not thank the writer for this.

There is a tendency – widespread in officialdom but by no means exclusive to it – to jazz up language by replacing plain words with fancy ones for no good reason, for example with what Arthur Quiller-Couch called “vague woolly abstract nouns”. Somehow people feel that simple, everyday language is not impressive enough, and that what’s needed is more abstract and ostentatious vocabulary. Not so.

In a similar vein, I received a letter recently about renewing my driving licence. Referring to a certain piece of information (the possibility that I was dead, I may as well add), the letter asked the reader to “advise this fact” to the relevant government office. Advise this fact is the kind of jargon – officialese, you could call it – that results when let us know is mistakenly thought to be too informal, and tell and even inform too suspiciously plain.

These are minor examples. Every year, the worst types of unclear and convoluted language gain the dubious recognition of a “Golden Bull” or other award from the Plain English Campaign. Macmillan Dictionary Blog reported on the shortlist and winners a couple of years ago, and you can see the 2011 winners – announced last weekend – by browsing the categories on the Campaign website.

When prose is intended to convey information to a general audience, some of whom might not speak English as a first language, it is likely to be effective principally in proportion to its plainness. Plain English does not mean that the style is bland, insipid or unattractive; rather it implies clarity, precision, directness and a lack of pretension, with the most suitable words chosen and in their best positions. This is something to which any organisation can aspire.

If I’ve had a tough day, there’s nothing that gives me greater pleasure than to curl up on the sofa watching telly, with a nice cuppa, a bar of choccy, maybe a few biccies too, and in case I feel the need for virtual company, my beloved lappy  at my side …

If you’re wondering what on earth is next to me on the sofa, check out this week’s BuzzWord, which reveals all and throws the spotlight on those ‘cute’ abbreviated forms that we sometimes use to refer to familiar things in a quasi-affectionate way. Though most of us take informal words like telly for granted, closer consideration of the concept led me to question why some everyday objects get this kind of ‘cuddly’ treatment, and others don’t. Can you join me in a quest to gather more of these forms? Do you have any special ones in your own particular idiolect? Or if English isn’t your first language, maybe you could tell us if your native language has an equivalent?

In a comment to my post about confusing word pairs, I said that as a child I called a pen a “biro” and a vacuum cleaner a “hoover”. I knew the terms pen and vacuum cleaner, but only later did I learn that biro was named after the Hungarian inventor László Bíró, while hoover comes from the Hoover Company – in other words, that they’re eponyms.

An eponym – back-formed from eponymous – is when something is named after a person or other proper noun. Eponym can refer to the source and to the thing named, which could be a place, action, object, description and so on. An eponymous album is one with the same name as the band, while an eponymous character or hero is one whose name appears in the title of the story, such as Emma or Oliver Twist.

The origins of some eponyms are well known, such as boycott from Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott and mesmerise from Franz Mesmer. Others are less obvious. Sandwich, panic, silhouette, algorithm and nicotine all derive from proper nouns: John Montagu (4th Earl of Sandwich), Pan (Greek god), Etienne de Silhouette (French finance minister), al-Khwārizmī (Persian mathematician) and Jean Nicot (French diplomat who inspired the formal plant name Nicotiana).

Mentor was the name of Odysseus’ friend in The Odyssey, and the word is popular today both as a generic noun for someone who advises another, and as a verb for what they do. It also led to the adjective mentorial and the noun mentee, meaning a person who is mentored (though protégé is generally preferred).

Scientific discoveries are frequently named after their discoverer. Medical science is full of examples, while laws and principles (many of them in physics) are often eponymous. These might, however, be more accurately considered pseudo-eponyms.

Some writers’ styles and ideas have been distinctive enough to give us eponymous adjectives, for example Kafkaesque, Dickensian and Orwellian. Although these words convey a meaning associated with the writers, they have taken on a life of their own. This is especially true of sadistic and its noun form sadism, which we owe to the Marquis de Sade.

Brand names too can become so widely used that the object or activity loses its strict association with the brand. It happened to biro, escalator, yo-yo, and zipper, and it’s happening to Rollerblades and Google – both of which are still trademarks. Corporations tend to resist this trend, but over time it can be hard to prevent genericization of a successful brand name.

Eponyms are still appearing, many of them nonce words. When the celebrity Kim Kardashian’s marriage broke up rather quickly this year, comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic reportedly said: “72 Days is now an official unit of time known as a Kardash.” It’s a new eponym, but an old kind of fame – or infamy.

Sometimes nature reports come from unexpected sources. The Twitter account of Iarnród Éireann, Ireland’s national railway system, recently posted a picture of a visitor to their tracks, accompanied by the description: “Another prosecution as Frog flaunts trespassing laws!”

The company is to be applauded for sharing wildlife photos with light-hearted humour, but its word choice raises a minor problem. What was meant was not flaunts but flouts. To flaunt is to show off; to flout is to deliberately ignore a rule or convention.

It’s an easy mistake to make: the two words are similar, and neither is especially common. We read them now and then in print, but I think most people would go a long time without using either, if they ever did at all.

There are many pairs of words whose meanings persistently elude or confuse us, sending us on repeat visits to the same page of a dictionary. For some, it’s compliment and complement; for others, appraise and apprise, chord and cord, altar and alter, militate and mitigate, pedal and peddle, insidious and invidious, or comprise and compose (ignoring those meanings of compose that are never confused with comprise).

One way to resolve such uncertainty is by using a mnemonic: a memory aid in the form of a line, rhyme, formula, or image. To remember that flaunt means show off, for example, you could think of the aunt in flaunt and picture your aunt behaving ostentatiously. To make it doubly effective, address the other word in the pair, too: notice the lout in flout and think of a lout flouting the law – cocking a snook at police.

It needn’t be an elaborate image – a single letter can suffice. The e in stationery can be tied to letter and envelope, the a in stationary to car and van. (I’ve used this one since primary school.)

Mnemonics can help us only if we put them to work. First we need to be aware that there’s a difficulty, and to take responsibility for it. The tricks we devise can be personally meaningful or arbitrary and absurd, so long as they’re readily brought to mind. The more memorable they are, the more reliably they’ll do the job.

If you can’t think of a mnemonic, another strategy is to list troublesome words and write brief definitions or synonyms on a page near your desk. Consult it often enough, and eventually the meanings will come to you automatically, which will help you save effort and avoid frustration.

Are there word pairs you struggle to distinguish? What techniques do you use?

Here is the third (following the first and second) in our monthly instalment of a question answered by our wonderful and ever-growing group of guest bloggers. The question we’ve asked this month was:

What word in English is loaded with the most ‘class’ content for you?

This was a bit of a difficult one to answer (and some of you told me as much in no uncertain terms, thank you!). But we got some great answers anyway:

Good question! I don’t pay much attention to class, except when I’m examining it for reasons of research or curiosity, but one word that occasionally sets off alarm bells for me is proper. I find it often bundled with misguided presumptions about what is or isn’t correct, with the predictable bias towards standard English and a corresponding mistrust of non-standard forms of expression.
So ain’t ain’t proper, regional idioms aren’t proper either, and even pronouncing either a certain way isn’t proper. People who subscribe to these linguistic judgements without making any allowance for social and geographic context and register sometimes hold analogous ideas about how people should dress, eat, and behave. One way – their way – is “proper”; other ways are vulgar, uncouth, and perfectly beastly.
There is no absolute “proper” English: what’s proper is whatever is appropriate to the circumstances. I recommend, as an antidote or inoculation, repeat visits to the Proper English Foundation.
Stan Carey from Sentence first

The English word that I think has the most class bias is dependent, which regularly is applied to low-income people but rarely to wealthier people. Media reports and blogs derisively state that poor people are “dependent” upon minuscule government programs such as food stamps (recently renamed SNAP benefits), but rarely point out that most people obtain such help for relatively short periods of time when they are down on their luck. Conversely, when billionaires receive massive corporate welfare payments or huge special tax breaks to support them, the word dependent is rarely used, and instead they are still routinely touted as “self-made” even (as in the case of Donald Trump) if they inherited their original fortunes. While our use of language values “teamwork” in football and military maneuvers, we like to give ourselves the false impression that each of us made it or failed on our own. However, there is some push-back of late to that notion, and even some billionaires now willingly admit how much they owe society, including Warren Buffett, who said: “I personally think that society is responsible for a significant percentage of what I’ve earned.”
Joel Berg from New York City Coalition Against Hunger

It’s easy to get po-faced about this but the worst offender is chav. Many who are extremely fastidious when it comes to describing ethnicity, have no such scruples when it comes to expressing their class prejudice.
On a lighter note, the word footie (for football) always sounds like an impostor to me. It is trying far too hard to sound proletarian – and I should know as I’ve worked down a mine since I was eleven …
Kieran McGovern from ESOL eBooks

Well, quite simply teacher!
Educationalists may aspire to a ‘classless’ society, but the wealth of English words for teachers betrays a persistent class-consciousness. I started out as a teaching assistant – the lowest of the low. At the same time, I moonlighted as a private tutor to children from leafy suburbs, definitely a step up the class ladder, though still far below the status of the masters, dons, lecturers and supervisors who taught me at school and university. On arriving in France however I was delighted to learn I had joined the ranks of the professional classes; no longer a mere teacher, I became a trainer (not that the pay seemed to justify the distinction). Since then I have been called an instructor, (a step down I feel) a monitor (a bit back to school, but a better class of school, don’t you think?), a facilitator (mixed feelings on that one) and nowadays, a coach (more the distinctly upper-class life-coach rather than the more working-class football variety, I think – but funny how often salaries seem to be inversely proportional to class). Yet the zenith of my teaching achievements was reached when, travelling in Eastern Europe, I was addressed as Professor, an accolade as undeserved as it was satisfying finally to hobnob with the academic elite!
John Allison from John’s Words and Music

The pronunciation of the letter H as ‘haitch‘ is no longer the great class divide in Australia that it used to be, but I still find people who are amazed that I say ‘haitch’. When I explain to them that this is normal Irish pronunciation they are equally surprised. I had no idea there was a problem with ‘haitch’ until I emigrated to Australia. My question is why do dictionaries provide ‘zed’ and ‘zee’ as alternatives for Z but not ‘haitch’ along with ‘aitch’?
Dymphna Lonergan from Flinders University, Australia

I’ll never forget when I asked for a serviette in my local fish and chip shop back home in Scotland. The guy behind the counter looked at me with an expression that bordered between utter contempt and genuine disbelief. And as he didn’t say anything, I actually repeated it.
Clearly the correct word to use in this sort of social environment is napkin. A lesson learned, but I remain baffled as to why I was laughed out of the shop, simply for adding a bit of French flavour to proceedings.
There’s a time and a place to use certain words. Requesting a serviette in a chip shop full of locals is not recommended.
Finn Kirland

My suggestion is civilian. There is a view (not necessarily one I share) that the UK’s traditional class system has been replaced by a three-level hierarchy that goes: chavs (at the bottom), everyone else (in the middle), and celebrities (at the top). I agree with Kieran McGovern about the unpleasant way chav is used: in his book on the subject (Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class) Owen Jones describes chav as ‘a hate-filled word’. As for celebrities, some people treat them like royalty and aspire to be like them, while many celebs (or slebs) behave as if they are a different species. In line with this new class system, the word civilians is apparently used (disparagingly or pityingly) by celebrities to refer to the rest of us. Grrr.
Michael Rundell

Aside from the word grand, which must be accompanied by a hand flourish outwards indicating twinkling lights and diamonds in a field of all tomorrow’s parties, a better answer for me is the word yah. Being South African saying yah for ‘yes’ is the norm, perhaps because ja (pronounced ‘yah’) is the Afrikaans word for ‘yes’. But when I came to England I couldn’t help but notice that saying yah had a strange effect on the people around me. They would sort of squirm, or whince and slighlty avert their eyes (this was particularly obvious when hunt-sabbing, or getting milk from our local in Bethnal Green, for example). Bless the English, though: no-one ever said anything directly, nobody told me yah was posh and that if I was a bloke I’d probably be getting a beating right here, right now. Twenty years later, although I get it now and always say yeah or yup or something less Made in Chelsea, am I right in thinking that yah is no longer quite as offensive as it was twenty years ago? I am testing this out and so far … no squirming.
Laine Redpath Cole

In its most familiar sense, jargon means specialised, often technical vocabulary associated with a particular type of work or area of activity. For example, there’s scientific jargon, medical jargon, airlinese, and business speak (the last of which I’ve written about before).

Jargon is part of a sublanguage, and is subject to forces of change just like our common vocabulary is. Technology evolves quickly and its jargon is churned out at a corresponding rate. Entire avenues of research and use are rendered obsolete by superior (or better commercialised) developments, so what were technological buzzwords one year might be unrecognisable just a few years later.

On her Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman recently wrote about the “Tech Jargon of Yore”, the yore in her title an ironic note on how rapidly tech terminology can become outdated. Browsing Jargon Watch, a book of popular digital jargon from 1997, she says these words “remind or enlighten us about the demands, annoyances, and fixations” of the mid-1990s.

Some of these phrases, such as astroturfing and going postal, have survived the intervening years, while others were briefly popular but faded fast. Bitnik, for example, refers to “someone who uses a public, coin-operated computer terminal to log onto the Internet.” Jargon Watch has seven bit words, apparently – all of them obsolete according to Nancy.

Fast-forwarding to the jargon of today, Adrian Weckler’s article “Tech lingo 101 FTW, OK?” in Ireland’s Business Post reports that IT and online jargon has gotten out of hand, and that abbreviations now “rule our lives”. Acronyms and initialisms have always been popular in brand names, but they seem more prevalent than ever, partly on account of microblogging services like Twitter that encourage compression and make every typographic character count.

David Pogue in the NYT has a related complaint, wondering why tech writers rely so much on jargon and attributing it to habit, laziness, or self-aggrandisement. As the writer of a tech column, he has learned some tricks designed to “communicate technical points without losing the novices”. This is crucial when conveying any kind of specialised material to a wide audience.

In tech journals and on tech websites, a certain level of familiarity may be assumed, and in more mainstream contexts some specialist terminology has become common enough to be used without fear of unintelligibility. So long as jargon is reasonably transparent and pitched at the appropriate level, there is no cause for alarm; when communication fails because the words we use are too obscure or esoteric, people will either stop reading or let us know.

Do the “walls of techno-babble” leave you feeling cached out, stuck in dial-up while others are high-speed beta users in the cloud? Is tech jargon’s functionality in need a reboot? Let us know in a comment – or in the “comment field”, if you prefer.