Once again, it's the season when the dictionary and language people are hard at work winnowing words -- new ones, catchy ones, much-looked-up ones, over-used ones -- in preparation for crowning their latest Word of the Year (WOTY). This year, we thought we might do a bit of winnowing of our own.
The announcements, mostly made in January, are always fun occasions for us amateur word lovers, in part because we get to roll our eyes at the pros' ideas of a good WOTY (pronounced "whoa-tee," according to the U.S. Oxford Dictionary's editor). But they are also genuinely interesting, because of the light shed by the WOTY finalists on the year that we as a planet have just been through -- or at least, those of us on the English-speaking bits.
Take some of last year's choices. Merriam-Webster's 2005 Word of the Year, based on the number of online lookups it received, reflected something between a wish and a hope: "integrity." Perhaps we were seeing so little evidence of integrity that year we temporarily forgot what it was.