From Fresh Air on WHYY, from National Public Radio
Knowing Geoff Nunberg's 2010 Word Of The Year
By Geoff Nunberg
If you were ranking those "word of the year" selections for importance against all of the year-end best-of and top-10 lists, they should fall somewhere between "10 biggest fashion faux pas" and "best celebrity tweets." They're either idle exercises or publicity gambits for dictionaries, and the short lists run to the blends, malaprops and stunt words that word geeks are drawn to — like vuvuzela, webisode and guidette. They're actually not even that interesting as words. They're the cat pictures of the English lexicon....
But refudiate, guidette, vuvuzela — they don't have much to do with the run of our daily conversation over the past 12 months. You could make a better case for some other recent words, like crowd-sourcing or double-dip or ObamaCare. But it struck me that you could also capture the prevailing mood by going to the other extreme, and picking that common particle "no," in its various functions....