The company claims they choose the winner based not on intrinsic merit or accomplishments, but rather on how many times people looked the word up. That makes this year’s winner doubly disturbing. “Austerity” getting the nod means our primary education system must be in even worse shape than the economy.
I will not be so jejeune as to suggest a connection between a nation’s standard of public education and its long-term economic viability, but I bet the U.S. retail sector would collapse if we boycotted vendors who use scare quotes in their ads or spell “barbecue” with a q.
I can, however, suggest a better method for deriving outsized claims about the social and technological Zeitgeist from scanty linguistic data. Do not try this at home. To paraphrase Dan Coffey, I am not a real linguist. I have a master’s degree. In linguistics.
No thanks to which I landed a job as a part-time copy editor for the smallest daily newspaper in the country, and spent much of last week proofing letters to Santa Claus from local children for publication in our annual Holiday Greetings special section.
I don’t know why academia has ignored this source material, which would blow away hemlines and beards for economists and beat Facebook hollow for sociologists. For linguists, the most telling datum in the 2010 Santa letters signals a momentous convulsion in our reality on par with the widespread adoption of “acoustic piano.”
What does a redundantly named musical instrument have to do with sociolinguistics? Allow me to digress (but note I do commit to making an equal number of pushes and pops).
In semantics — the subfield of linguistics concerned with meaning in language — we refer to words as “marked” or “unmarked” for properties not essential to their main definition. To illustrate, I exhibit a riddle from an old joke book always in high demand at the Whiteford Elementary School library in the early 1970s:
A man and his son have a terrible car accident. The man dies, and medics rush his son to the hospital. In the operating room the surgeon sees the patient and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” How can this be?
Even in 1971, this riddle sucked. But apparently when the book was written, the appearance of a woman surgeon sufficed to catch most people with their stereotypes down. In linguistic terms, “surgeon” was marked for gender. The word indicated not only a human who performed medical operations, but a male (white, adult, non-disabled, Protestant, etc.) human, unless you specifically mentioned anything about race, gender, age and so on.
Words get marked and unmarked as society and technology changes. “Surgeon” used to be marked for gender and is now unmarked.
“Piano” started out unmarked for power source. From Beethoven to Tatum, the sound from a piano emerged due to direct mechanical generation. Then the unneutered housepet of sociolinguistics as who should say claimed some territory. With the invention of the electric piano, it occasionally became necessary to specify what you meant by "piano."
The important thing to note here is that “piano” went from unmarked with respect to method of sound production to marked as mechanical. If you meant electric piano, you had to say “electric piano.” Otherwise people assumed you meant the same kind Beethoven played.
At some point during the 1960s, musicians got so used to electric pianos, they stopped saying “electric” and just assumed you meant electric when you said “piano.” At that point the marking changed, and if you wanted to talk about a regular, old-fashioned piano, you had to specify, and that created a lexical gap.
Whoever thought of sticking “acoustic” on the front of “piano” to mean regular and non-electric achieved the kind of immortality I covet.
I thought “Skoldetnai” as a portmanteau of Soldatna and Kenai would prove my ticket into the neologistic big time, but it didn’t catch on with the people of the Peninsula. Then I pinned my hopes on “ambient reality,” which I coined when the rise of “virtual reality” meant we had to get more specific about where your head’s at. Then I found out cybergeeks had already adopted “RL” (for “real life”) to fill that role.
I may still have a chance here, since “RL” has gotten little traction in — savor the poetic justice — RL. Even if “ambient reality” does not ultimately triumph, I already feel somewhat vindicated. To the gatekeepers of cyberspace argot, I only pose this query: If it’s all in my head, where is my head?
Back to the Santa letters. The most striking request our freshest descendants had of the jolly sleigh driver: a “real puppy.” (I almost had to write this column about kids wanting paralytic shellfish poisoning, but the video game reviewer in the newsroom set me straight.)
So here we are. In post-"Avatar" 2010, children grow up with the default use of the word “puppy” referring to a plastic and electronic “pet,” and you have to add more words if you mean the old fashioned kind that pees on the leg of your acoustic piano, gnaws your print newspaper and guards your brick-and-mortar storefront.
In effect, living creatures are no longer marked for reality, itself now a relative concept. We stand on the brink of the final triumph of the cosmic, epistemological, ontological scare quotes. As ambient reality fades away we are all marked adult, white, Protestant men. And women, and African-Americans, and Sikhs, and pangolins …
Me and acoustic puppy Calypso
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