Perched majestically at the summit of the clutter on my desk this sunny December morning is a copy of the 2011 edition of Jiyukokuminsha's 「現代用語の基礎知識」("Gendai Yōgo no Kiso Chishiki," "Encyclopedia of Contemporary Words") — all 1,688 pages of it.
Since 1948, this annual publication, the latest of which went on sale Nov. 18, has been the acknowledged authority on the evolution of the Japanese language. A joint effort by dozens of linguists, lexicographers and other academics, the hefty paperback parades what it claims are 27,000 neologisms, new political concepts and scientific terms, acronyms, recent foreign word borrowings, and domestically generated slang since the 2010 edition. New from this year is the use of color coding for indexing the sections.
After lugging the weighty tome back home each year, I invariably jump first to 時代・流行 (jidai, Era / ryūkō, Trends), which has a sub-section named 最近語 (saikingo, most recent words). Among this year's entries were グーグル症 (gūguru-shō, Google syndrome), which is used to describe hypochondriacs who eschew consulting a physician, and instead input their real or imagined symptoms into the eponymous search engine to discover — to their dismay — that they suffer from some rare and horrible disease.