If it's December, it's time for those list-loving dictionary folks to be announcing their Words of the Year again -- and in the process providing editorial writers with a revealing lens on the past 12 months. This year, their labors yielded a couple of startlingly different scenarios.
First, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary came up with a tech-heavy shortlist and ultimately pronounced "podcast" their Word of the Year. For those of you who think a podcast might have something to do with peas, the word is a combination of iPod and broadcast, and denotes "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player" (such as an iPod). If you find that arcane, wait till you read the rest of the Oxford list.
A few days later, the people at Merriam-Webster put "integrity" at the top of a news-dominated word list that included such 2005 headline staples as "tsunami" and "conclave."