Austerity is Merriam Webster's word of the year this year: Link. This site says that austerity was the subject of more than 250,000 searches on the dictionary's Web site. These were the runners-up: pragmatic, moratorium, socialism, bigot, doppelgänger, shellacking, ebullient, dissident, and furtive. "Slate" has interesting linguistic perspective on the current use of the word:
quote:
It makes sense that readers might be confused by the suddenly ubiquitous term, more evocative of great aunts and catechism teachers than taxes and public-sector salaries. The Oxford English Dictionary—apologies, Merriam-Webster, but my heart belongs to one—lists the first definition as "harshness to the taste, astringent sourness." Then comes the common definition: "Harshness to the feelings; stern, rigorous, or severe treatment or demeanor; judicial severity." Only down at the bottom, in section 4b, does the OED get around to something approaching the 2010 vernacular: "Applied attrib., esp. during the war of 1939–45, to clothes, food, etc., in which non-essentials were reduced to a minimum as a war-time measure of economy."
However, my favorite quote from "Slate" was this:
quote:
But austerity—ahem, eschewing socialism, acting like Hoover's doppelgänger, retaining your bigotry about debt, being ebullient about fiscal belt-tightening and putting a moratorium on unnecessary spending, making furtive any dissident Keynesian thoughts so as to avoid a shellacking by the bond markets—might not be the most pragmatic solution.
I like the view from N.E. Editorial Roundup - Let's hope next year the word is prosperity!
