Nathan Bierma's Chicago Tribune article reports on the words-of-the-year, or the like, as selected by various 'authorities'.

Words chosen include truthiness (Merriam Webster), carbon neutral (New Oxford American Dictionary), and crackberry (Webster's New World). Some professor chimed in with roadside bomb, and a publisher announced the buzzwords that were the "most fun" (blamestorming, etc.) and the "most dreadful" ("While we’re leveraging our assets, can you synopsize the mission-critical meeting, then relanguage it by the targeted completion date?”).

Enjoy! Many of these sites share extra words that were considered. I particularly liked the "most fun".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

You beat me to it, Shu!

Here are nominations from Barrett's "The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English":
~ Data Valdez - An accidental release of a large quantity of private or privileged information
~ Marble ceiling - The government's version of the "glass ceiling," or gender discrimination.
~ 7,000-mile screwdriver - Micromanagement of a situation from afar: My personal favorite!


Then there's Wayne Glowka's "Among New Words" column in the American Speech journal, which has:
~ Cut and jog - Cut and ran at a slower pace
~ Spew - Gibberish in e-mail intended to fool a spam filter
~ Sock puppet - An assumed identity on the Internet (This is new???)

How's about it, Wordcrafters? What's our word of the year?