the list of 9 for december 28, 2008:
NINE WORDS THAT SUM UP 2008
What a year, eh folks? I can't wait for it to be over. Myself, I did all right. Didn't make much money, but made more than I could have. Didn't get sick. Shot a couple of short films, got some interesting jobs. But the economy tanked, lots of people everywhere lost a lot of money, and there's nowhere to go but up. (Can you imagine the pressure on Barack Obama to turn around this miserable feeling? Yikes.) Anyway, the New Oxford American Dictionary named "hypermiling" the word of the year. I had never even heard of this word before their announcement, and certainly don't know anyone who's ever used it. These are the nine words that I would choose:

  1. STAYCATION. The portmanteau of the year, this clever wordsums up the plight of the American traveler: with gas prices at an all-time high this summer, andthe dollar in the toilet against the Euro and the pound, amongst others, more and more peopledecided to stay at home this year. Hence the word.

  2. BAILOUT. Merriam-Webster agrees with me here. I'mreferring, of course, to the billions of dollars the U.S. government gave to Wall Street firms inorder to supposedly keep the economy from total collapse and ruin. Is it working? Did we need it?Ask an economist - in twenty years.

  3. FAIL. Without question, the faddish word of the year foranybody who spent time on the Web was "fail," used sort of as a noun, e.g., "Your attempt at ajoke in your above comment was a total fail." This supplanted the trendy Internet term of 2007,which was "FTW" (for the win), which was sort of used in place of "rules". In other words, "Markrules!" would translate as "Mark FTW!" That acronym would be considered a fail today.

  4. MAVERICK. If there's any one person who represented whatwas new and noteworthy in 2008 (I am hoping Obama will cover 2009 through 2016), it was vicepresidential candidate Sarah Palin, who came out of nowhere (well, she is governor of Alaska, buttell that to the 300 million Americans who don't live there) and sucked up the limelight like therewas no tomorrow. (And, after she and John McCain lost the election, there may well be no tomorrowfor Palin, if we in the lower 48 are lucky.) Anyway, their whole doomed campaign aligned itselfwith the word "maverick," which Palin threw around to the point of self-parody.

  5. RICKROLLED. Back to the Internet - the only thing I knowabout, it seems - for what was the prank of the year: sending a friend a link to a site, only forthe link to open up a video of Rick Astley's 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up," usually with theannouncement, "You got Rickrolled!" I might not have included this had not this year's Macy'sThanksgiving Parade Rickrolled itself by having Astley suddenly leap onto a float to sing thesong, introducing the term to millions of baffled Americans who barely explore the Web pastcnn.com or Amazon.

  6. TWITTER. Another big Web phenomenon of the year, Twitterhas been around since 2006, but it finally hit big this year, when people decided they kind ofliked the idea of "microblogging" - sending little reports about their minute-by-minute activitiesto anybody who cared to read them. I'm not usually wrong about what's going to be a hit, but Isure missed this goldmine. When I first heard about Twitter I didn't think it would go anywhere.Boy, was I wrong.

  7. GREENWASHING. A play on "whitewashing," this word is usedto describe fraudulent claims by companies marketing themselves as environmentally friendly.Apt for a year that started off as being all about the business of ecology, and wound up as alitany of corporate malfeasance and thievery.

  8. TWILIGHT. For entertainment, I was torn. "Batmania,"perhaps? After all, The Dark Knight was by far the biggest hit of the year, and alsotouched upon one of the biggest, saddest stories to come out of Hollywood, that of costar HeathLedger's shocking death. But I'm giving the nod to Stephenie Meyer's enormously popularTwilight series of teenage vampire books. Although they were all best-sellers before thedawn of 2008, the series didn't become a household word until this year, thanks to the release ofTwilight the movie, based on the first book, and the publication of the fourth and finalbook in the series. The Dark Knight was far more popular, but mainly because it was simplya good movie. It never attracted the insane cult following of Meyer's books, which got moreteenage girls (and their moms) to sit down and read a novel than even J.K. Rowling could muster.

  9. GAME-CHANGER. The obnoxious corporate/political term of the year, ranking right up there (or right down there) with past horrors such as "ping me" or "at the end of the day". This was used to describe anything that was new and possibly important, from, well, Sarah Palin to Twitter.

Copyright © Mark Tapio Kines 2011