Ted Landphair of Voice of America had an interesting story recently about a contest that is held (takes place) each year by the publishers of Webster’s New World Dictionary to pick a new word or term that became popular in the past year to put into their dictionary. This “word of the year” is voted on by the public selecting from among five choices.
Here were the choices for 2008, with the definitions:
- Overshare – telling people more than you intended to or wanted to, especially online (such as Facebook, Twitter, and other similar sites).
- Leisure sickness – the idea that some people feel better while they’re working and worse when they are on vacation (leisure means not working).
- Cyberchondriac – this is a variation on the word hypochondriac, who is someone who imagines that they are sick all the time. A cyberchondriac is someone who reads about some illness on the Internet and then thinks that they have it, too.
- Selective ignorance – this is when you ignore on purpose (intentionally, deliberately) certain information, such as your emails.
- Youthanasia – this is a variation of euthanasia, which is when someone is killed because they are very sick. Youthanasia is when you try to stay young longer than you should by getting plastic surgery on your face, skin, etc. to make you look younger.
So who won the contest? Overshare. I will try not to overshare in 2009.