Want to name the Word of the Year for 2006? The American Dialect Society has not yet made its choice, and says that nominations are welcome for Word of the Year, as well as Most Useful, Most Creative, Most Unnecessary, Most Outrageous, Most Euphemistic; Most Likely to Succeed; and Least Likely to Succeed.

The good news: Your competition is weak. Nominations are in from only two people, and don't strike me as very compelling. None seems to have had any major huge import in this year's news, or any great chance of being still in use five years from now. I mean, really; look at them:

One nominator: Axis Envy; blue-dog Democrat [not new!]; brokeback; Cambodian accessories, car-parazzi; chesticles; consensus science; CrackBerry addict; cut and jog; ecosexual; entreprenegro; foleyed; Fed-Ex; grill; gauging; lyric malfunction; m- compounds; Mel Gibson; new castrati; nicotini; rainbow sheep; sock-puppet [not new!]; speaker-in-waiting; spew; tramp stamp; White House Reporter Syndrome. The other: anchor baby; chief memory officer; data Valdez; digiroid; Fox lips; God wink; humand directional; Hummer house; husband-sitter; Johnny Jihad; Katrina brain; marble ceiling; nork; seven-thousand-mile screwdriver; sharrow; sudden jihad syndrome.

The bad news: time is very short. Nominations will be culled on Jan. 4, and voted upon on Jan. 5.

So if you have any great ideas, or any not-so-great ones, now is the time! Here are the rules:

Remember, the word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as a "vocabulary item"—not just single words but phrases can be nominated, too. Nominated terms do not have to be brand new, but they should be newly prominent or notable in the past year, usually by being widely discussed or of widespread importance.

foleyed

Of course, this refers to the disgraced congressman in the news this year, but there's another Foley who gave his name as a word: Jack Foley who was the first foley artist. If you stay and watch the credits as they roll at the end of a movie, you may have seen (besides grip and best boy) the term foley artist. And there's also cookie (or cucoloris) in movie lighting. Now you know.

FEDUP ...... the name of the company resulting from the merge of FedEx and United Parcel. It contains a thinly-veiled comment on the U.S. Postal service, too.

And the winner is: the American Dialect Society voted "plutoed" as the word of the year, in a run-off against climate canary. To pluto is to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet.

In other categories:

• Most Useful: climate canary: an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint [sic] at a larrger environmental catastrophe on the horizon.
• Most Creative: lactard: a person who is lactose intolerant.
• Most Unnecessary: SuriKat: the supposed nickname of the baby girl of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.
• Most Outrageous: Cambodian accessory: Angelina Jolie's adopted child who is Cambodian.
• Most Euphemistic: waterboarding: an interrogation technique in which the subject is immobilized and doused with water to simulate drowning; reported to be used by U.S. interrogators against terrorism detainees.
• Most Likely to Succeed: YouTube: as a verb, to use the YouTube web site or to have a video of one's self [sic] be [sic] posted on the site.
• Least Likely to Succeed: grup: a Gen-Xer who does not act his or her age.

Full details here.

Interesting, Shu. So if someone gets a demotion at work, are they plutoed? I guess it's not capitalized?