#lsa2017

Gretchen: It's a lot of fun! It's got a certain structure to it. We always have a limited amount of time because that's just how conferences work, and so in the past all the years that I've been at it’s chaired by Ben Zimmer, who stands in front of the mic and tries to keep us moving along and and counts votes and then he has a bunch of vote talliers. So voting is by show of hands and there's a vote tallier for each section of people, who walk down the rows and count the people in their sections. So they report back to Ben, you can just watch all this happen, they report back to Ben and then you have Grant Barrett on the slides and so he writes down those numbers and you can see him project it up there. Grant is generally in a word document projected up onto the screen and so he takes down those notes and also makes whatever snarky comments come into his head when he feels like it on the slides (which is fairly often) so that's a lot of fun.

Lauren: So it's like a meta commentary happening on the slides. And then there's a whole other kind of dialogue happening on Twitter. So for those of us that don't make it to LSA every year, there’s hanging out on the WOTY hashtag which we'll put a link to in the show notes because there was lots of great tweeting happening around it and it meant that even for those who weren't there we got to feel like we we're kind of participating.

Gretchen: Yeah, there's also the hashtag, which is always confusing for people because it's WOTY16 because the sixteen refers 2016 the previous year, whereas the LSA's hashtag is LSA2016 because that's LSA happening in the current year.

Lauren: LSA2017?

Gretchen: 17! See, even I got this wrong, because it's whatever, what year are we in!? So there's those parallel conversations happening in the hashtags, there's also conversations in the WOTY hashtag up to a month or two before, because bloggers will start proposing their candidates for words of the year making their blog post with recommendations. And people in general will just be posting in the hashtag saying “this is what I think would be a good thing”. People who can't make it but normally come will be nominating stuff and sometimes people get picked up by other people to say there's a buzz around this and I'm going to nominate it so there's kind of these advance and parallel conversations that happen on the hashtag as well.

Lauren: I put my nominations on the hashtag a couple of weeks before the event which was really fun because then I felt vaguely invested in the discussion.

Gretchen: Yeah, last year I wrote an opinion piece about why singular “they” should win and it did win so I felt very proud, although I'm sure I can't take complete credit for it because it was also kind of--

Lauren: But you did campaign for last year's winner.

Gretchen: Yeah it was kind of zeitgeist-y of the year, there had been a lot of talk about it and so I was happy to campaign for it. This year I was campaigning to keep the emoji of the year category in.

Lauren: Maybe we should talk about the categories in general. The American Dialect Society Word of the Year discussion is pretty elaborate because they have categories for different types of words and those categories shift and change every year, some of them have been around for a long time, some of them kind of come and go, and last year you got an emoji category up.

Gretchen: Yeah, so the Word of the Year categories are kind of a way of focusing conversation around particular types of things that come up a fair bit and a way of recognizing that there are often a whole bunch of words that are interesting in a given year and kind of having a more focused discussion about that rather than just having a giant list of 20 and having to pick a single word from that.

Some of the categories include a euphemism of the year, most useful, most likely to succeed, most creative. These categories have been around for quite a while and there's often different types of domains in those categories. But I was actually part of a subcommittee to change some of those categories because we have had in the past had categories like most unnecessary and the least less likely to succeed and most outrageous and those are kind of weird because if you know the words unlikely to succeed why are we even voting for it?

So sometimes for most outrageous or most unnecessary, we would get into this this discussion whether the word itself was unnecessary, or if the concept itself was outrageous, which was which. So those had turned out kinda weird, so we abolished the 'least' categories, least likely to succeed and most unnecessary for this year and we added a couple new topic based ones, like politics word of the year and digital word of the year and slang word of the year to bring stuff back into domains rather than the idea of necessity. I think that was relatively effective definitely a bit easier to vote on then trying to determine whether something is outrageous.

Lauren: Yeah because one person's like, “this is a word I've been using for years, it's completely fine” whereas another person is, “oh my gosh how could you even say that?”

Gretchen: It also depends because the room itself is made up of anybody from the Linguistics Society of America conference that wants to attend and so it's got kind of a mix, it's got linguists but it's got grad students, it's got senior professors, it's got undergrads a few of them come, it's a bit of a mix. And sometimes you get someone saying, “I've never heard of any of these words!” But you look at them and you think, “Well, I don't know how exposed you are to newer words.” So it also depends on kind of where people are coming from that's why it's a vote I guess.

Lauren: Yeah and it's quite a discussion, right.

Gretchen: Yeah, it's quite a discussion. And you know in a room full of a couple hundred people the speeches from the floor have to be quite short -- it's a 30-second limit -- but it does turn into quite a lively discussion.

Lauren: So someone mentioned something about clicking this year?

Gretchen: Yeah, so one of the things that was new about the vote this year was that sometimes when someone would make a really good point in a little speech from the floor, a bunch of people would snap their fingers, you would get kind of a wave of finger-snapping across the room. I thought that was kind of interesting, it's something that hadn't happened in previous years. I think a couple people started doing it and then they would pop up when someone made a point. So that was kind of a good straw poll way of getting a sense of how much the room agreed with someone or disagreed with someone.

Lauren: Is that a thing from something that I don't know?

Gretchen: I'm aware of it as a way to express agreement with someone like you can say “snaps for this person” or do a couple fingers snaps, snap, snap, so you can snap your fingers to indicate agreement I've been aware of it for probably like 10 years by now? So it's a thing for some people.

Lauren: This kind of brings me to another point. Because I mean that's not a thing I'm familiar with but maybe it's a thing that happens in North America. But we currently have an Australian and Canadian talking about the American Dialect Society Word of the Year, how has that happened? Because this is one of the biggest and it gets a lot of press in the days after the vote and it's taken as one of the -- not definitive but we'll talk about in a bit like, there's a whole bunch of different dictionaries that give their word of the year -- but the American Dialect Society vote is one of the biggest events, why is that do you think?

Gretchen: I think it's partly because it's the oldest event so they've been doing Word of the Year since 1998, it was founded by Allan Metcalf. He's still around, he still comes to all the votes but he's passed the emceeing torch to Ben Zimmer. So it's the oldest of the Word of the Year events that I think anybody's aware of. And the conference is conveniently timed for early January. So for example the Canadian Linguistics Association conference, which I have been to, meets in May and it's kind of weird to select a word of the year in May and it's also much smaller. So I think it's considered a large group of linguists but there are some weird elements to it. Another weird element-- so I'm kind of a fan of the age range because I think having a few older people in the room help keep us from getting too trendy and having younger people in the room helps keep us with the trendy words. So I think the age range of the balance and the gender range of linguists tends to be fairly good, but there are more white people in linguistics and in academia in general than there are in the population at large, so I don't think we're totally representative there.

Lauren: Right, and from reading Twitter there was a bit of discussion around, and there seems to be every year, around the fact that in some of the categories you get a lot of words that come from African-American varieties of English. By time white girl Australian-in-England Lauren hears them they're like so filtered through many layers of popular culture, but there's this tension it seems between taking these words or borrowing them or there seems to be something a little bit awkward about the American Dialect Society’s relationship with some of these words. Would you say that's something that's reflected in the event?

Gretchen: Yeah, I think the American Dialect Society's relationship with these words is a reflection of our broader society’s relationship with these words. So African-Americans get stigmatized for themselves speaking African- American English or themselves speaking in ways that differ from what we consider educated English, what we consider mainstream English, and can get penalized on the job market and stuff like that. And yet suddenly some of these words get adopted as cool and and become popular when they weren't as popular in the mouths of the original people that were saying them and so I think justifiably that's not fair.

I think the American Dialect Society Word of the Year vote can in some cases reflect that words for African-American English get brought into mainstream society -- they get picked up in places like BuzzFeed, they get picked up by white celebrities, and white suburban teenagers and things like this. I think this is a process that does happen and in a sense the vote is chronicling things that do happen, so it's not necessarily inappropriate for the American Dialect Society to be reflecting that. But also to be making sure to reflect that these words have a longer history and have a longer context and that we owe them to the people that originally came up with them. And that you can't just talk about them as if they started in 2016 or in a particular year without that context before that.

Lauren: Okay, that makes sense.

Gretchen: I think that the long-term solution is, when you look at how words get borrowed from one language to another or one culture to another, they often reflected the existing power relationships that exist between those cultures. So words get borrowed between English and French but this isn't as fraught because English and French have had a relatively egalitarian power relationship through history, but that's not true for all of the words that have been borrowed into English. Whether that's from African-Americans or whether that's from indigenous peoples, or other people whose history has been erased as their words have been borrowed, those histories can be more fraught. And I think the least we can do is acknowledge that and give them credit for their linguistic creativity when we're doing that, but ultimately the way to make the power relationships less weird around those words being borrowed is to make those power relations be less weird in society in general.

Lauren: And I feel like that's why I really appreciate the Twitter feed that happens around the World of the Year because I get a much more diverse kind of perspective on these words and how people feel about them I feel like that kind of helps influence my awareness about words and their history especially from groups that I'm not in regular contact with.

Gretchen: I will say as someone who has been at the voting for a number of years, there are a number of people who make these points in the speeches from the floor during the voting as well. And I think they often sway the audience towards or against particular words based on what's going on there, pointing out the history of these words. It's a bit tricky with the nomination process to trace the full history of these words as they're being nominated in the same hour that we're doing the voting, so some of that history taking happens afterwards.

Lauren: Fair enough.

Gretchen: But I think continuing to point this out, continuing to point out that just because a word hits prominence in The New York Times, say, doesn't mean it's actually new that particular year, it may have a ten-year-old or 50 year old history among different group of people that we need to recognize.

Lauren: I mean we talked about this with singular they and the pronouns episode, that it has a history that spans centuries, it's just that it felt like it was being talked about and that the time was right for it.

Gretchen: Yeah, so the criteria for especially the American Dialect Society Word of the Year is not necessarily new, but “newly prominent”. Because the year in which a word is new it's often that nobody really notices at all and so it's when it feels prominent. In practice, the way that gets enforced is when a word that has been nominated before gets nominated again, Ben Zimmer will just say “Oh yeah, we had that word back in this year” because he somehow seems to know all of these.

Lauren: He's a Word of the Year oracle.

Gretchen: Basically if it hasn't been nominated before then it's fair game and somehow Ben Zimmer just knows all of the words that have ever been nominated.

Lauren: Useful man to have around.

Gretchen: Yes he’s very useful!

Lauren: We haven't even talked about the winner yet of the American Dialect Society Word of the Year!

Gretchen: That's true we haven't talked about the winner! So the overall winner, in case you somehow missed this, the overall winner was dumpster fire which can also optionally be expressed as an emoji with the wastebasket and the fire emoji but we did vote for it in its conventional English orthography. I think partly people felt like that was a very good word to sum up what 2016 had been and also how people have been talking about 2016 in terms of all of the bad things that had happened that year.

Lauren: Yeah so it was my nomination in my three weeks before the vote tweet so I feel--

Gretchen: congratulations!

Lauren: --very smug that I am of the zeitgeist.

Gretchen: You are on trend!

Lauren: None of my specific category votes were correct, I'll put them in the show notes, but my Word of the Year was the one that won. Awkwardly though, my super backward Android phone doesn't have the wastepaper basket in my emoji library so I can't even emoji tweet the Word of the Year which is a bit of a tech fail.

Gretchen: If you copy paste it from somewhere.

Lauren: I could, but it's getting very elaborate by that point. So it kind of was a dual win, so the word is the Word of the Year but people are also using the emoji as well.

Gretchen: People are also using the emoji as well. I think there was some discussion about whether the wastebasket is a very good dumpster because obviously those are quite different shapes. I think initially, at least when I had started using the wastebasket + fire, I had been using to stand for trash fire or obviously something that means the same thing.

Lauren: Which in my dialect is rubbish fire, or bin fire.

Gretchen: I would really say garbage fire probably because trash to me reads as American so trash fire or garbage fire, I've been using the wastebasket for which I think is a perfectly reasonable use of the wastebasket. But then of course because dumpster fire is a synonym for that then you get the dumpster fire.

Lauren: And there's been some good commentary on it, we'll link to Ben Zimmer's Language Log posts and Nancy Friedman's post on her blog about dumpster fire as the winner.

Gretchen: I will say that there's also something else that comes up in pretty much every Word of the Year vote is when a word reflects a political idea or an event or particular concept: Is voting for that particular word a political endorsement or is that simply a reflection that a thing has happened even if you don't agree with the fact that that's happened? And that was something that came up especially this year.

Lauren: Ok so this isn't the American Dialect Society admitting that 2016 was really bad by voting for this word.

Gretchen: Well, dumpster fire is comparatively neutral, but if you look at some of the other categories and we look at some of the discussion that happened during that vote, so things like deplorables and nasty women were nominated. There was some discussion about alt-right although don't know if it ended up actually being nominated. And these are certainly words that were used a lot in 2016 but is the nomination of them going to be taken as an endorsement?

And in some case it is. That's the thing. So last year when singular they was the one that was selected, I read several articles in the month thereafter saying, “Well, one of the reasons why you should use singular they, it has a long history, it solves a convenient gender neutrality problem, but also the American Dialect Society has endorsed it.” And so it does have that signalling function.

Lauren: Right, and we can't just say, “Well, it's a positive word so we voted for it as an endorsement and it’s a negative word so we voted for it as a warning.”

Gretchen: Yeah, and then the previous year the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was voted for. And so I think that was again saying this was a significant event that happened in a particular year, but it's also saying the American Dialect Society -- the people who are voting for that particular Word of the Year -- would also like to assert that black lives matter. It's hard to separate the political and social functions of words from simply their descriptive nature even though we would like to do that sometimes as linguists.

Lauren: So obviously dumpster fire was the ADS Word of the Year winner, but it seems like every dictionary has its own word of the year. There's words of the year all over the place at the end of the year, it's becoming an increasingly popular sport.

Gretchen: I mean it's such a good PR opportunity.

Lauren: Is this just a PR opportunity, is this why people do this?

Gretchen: I mean, you can't deny that you do get a bit of press out of that and people like reporting on it. There's a bit of a sense I think among various dictionaries and other groups, that places try to choose different words of the year. Because if you pick the same word of the year as someone else then you're not as interesting from a reporting side, or you're not making your own statement. So I think that there was a widespread expectation that Oxford dictionaries was going to choose Brexit because they're--

Lauren: --because they're the British one.

Gretchen: And then when they didn't maybe that freed up Collins Dictionary to choose Brexit.

Lauren: Oxford Dictionary chose post truth for anyone who's interested, we'll link to all these.

Gretchen: And they also pick different methodologies for choosing their words of the year. So the American Dialect Society has this big vote and at that point we're aware of what everyone else has chosen so there's often a bit of a tendency to not bother so much with already-chosen words.

And the American Dialect Society vote specifically focuses on new words, whereas several of the other dictionaries -- because they have statistics and what people have been looking up a lot -- they often focus on the words that have had a particular spike that year or that have been looked up more often than normal and go for that. Those different methodologies will also tend to lead them to different words. Dictionary.com, for example, because I happened to be talking with Jane Solomon about this, they had a spike in xenophobia around Brexit and I think also around the U.S. election so they were a couple different spikes there. For Merriam-Webster, their word was surreal, and in previous years they've had words like science -- they tend to choose the words that have just an overall high in that given year without particular spikes and that will tend to bias you towards more common words, so that's why you get stuff like surreal and science. So I think partly people try to choose different methodologies to keep it interesting you know, and then if it comes with some PR, I don't think anyone's objecting to that.

Lauren: The Australian National Dictionary Centre vote for their word of the year and they kind of do an internal office discussion thing and they have shortlist and then they have a winner. I'm very pleased that the 2016 word of the year for the ANDC was democracy sausage.

Gretchen: So you might need to explain what that is.

Lauren: So a democracy sausage -- earliest sources tend to be around 2012 but we had an election in and they were very popular in 2016 -- because we have this great system called compulsory voting. When you vote, which you have to do, afterwards often the local schools and local charities will set up a BBQ out the front and be cooking sausages. This is known as a sausage sizzle and you can buy yourself a sausage in a piece of bread maybe with some tomato sauce and onions and this is the cornerstone of democracy. The thing I was most excited about after I was 18 and I got to vote for the first time was that I got to vote and then I got to go out and have a sausage from the sausage sizzle afterwards. And this year thanks to the wonders of technology people got really into setting up like sausage sizzle finder apps so you could find a really good way to find a democracy sausage after voting.

Gretchen: I don't know why all voting booths don't have these in other countries. Like, I would like some democracy sausages in Canada please.

Lauren: Yeah, it's just part of it being like an event.

Gretchen: That sounds really fun and it's definitely a very Australian word because we don't have them. I looked up to see as the resident Canadian whether anybody had ever declared a Canadian Word of the Year and I'm very disappointed to report that I did not find much. So there was some guy who was declaring Word of the Year for 2009 to 2012 and then just kind of stopped but I think this is something I might need to get going. I might need to get my friends of the Canadian Linguistics Association, I do know many people in the Canadian Linguistics Association, and I might need to get them on that because everybody else gets their PR op but--

Lauren: Yeah, it's Canada's turn.

Gretchen: Yeah, it's Canada's turn. So we'll have to see if we can get a Canadian word of the year declared next year. And there are other stuff from other countries though, we're not going to list all the countries but Austria had a particularly interesting word of the year from their election and in my best German -- this word is 51 or 52 letter long, I didn't count, and reports vary -- the Austrian Word of the Year is 'Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung' and it means something like have a recount of the election, to do the election twice and this is something that apparently happened in Austria this year so people were talking about it a lot.

Lauren: There's also a Dutch Sign Language Word of the Year. The Dutch Sign Language Word of the Year is you put your hand flat on your head and then you lift your fingers up kind of 90 degrees and put them back down again which is the Dutch Sign Language sign for Donald Trump. You may be able to figure out where the iconicity for that one comes from. So Dutch Sign Language declared a sign of the year which was pretty cool. [Update: this was actually the Swiss Sign Language word of the year, not the Dutch, sorry about that!]

Gretchen: I asked a linguist who works on sign languages if there was an American Sign Language Word of the Year and she said 'Oh no there isn't but that's an interesting idea!' so maybe stay tuned.

Lauren: 2017!

Gretchen: If there is an ASL Sign of the Year or Auslan Sign of the Year we will be sure to report back.

Lauren: Something that people may be wondering by this point in the conversation, having talked about the Dutch sign, the Australian democracy sausage, the dumpster file which is also in emoji form, by the time you get to this point you thinking what even is a word right?

Gretchen: Because the word of the year is often a phrase.

Lauren: Well the Austrian one is basically like a sentence in English.

Gretchen: The Austrian would be a sentence in English, well, it would be kind of a compound noun in English, And the previous year singular they wasn't 'they' itself it was the fact that they was being used as singular that was a specific part of the words that we were looking at and yeah this does get us into the question of what even is a word.

Lauren: And by time you're kind of done with this you realize that linguists play pretty fast and loose with the definition of words. The unit of the word -- unless you're a dictionary maker or a lexicographer or something really specific like that -- you don't often think about words when you're doing linguistics, weirdly enough.

Gretchen: I think the average person thinks about a word as like, something with spaces around it. But that gets really complicated really quickly. So if you think about numbers, 22 when it's written in numerals doesn't have spaces but when it's written in words you can put a space in between it or you can put a dash in between it. And lots of compounds you can put a hyphen there or not put a hyphen there and does that make it two words now? I mean if you're writing an essay for a class and you have a word count ,maybe, but intuitively twenty-two with and without the hyphen mean the same thing so they should be the same word. Or if you take something like website you can write that open as web (space) site or website all together and those should be the same thing. And linguists would say those were the same thing.

Lauren: Yeah, so something like dumpster fire or democracy sausage. They’re nouns that are made up of other words so we think of them as compound nouns in linguistics. You know, I've kind of come to the point where I just try and tell people the word of the year is like word as in like a single semantic sense that has kind of one label, and maybe that label is a compound noun and sometimes that label as a single word and sometimes that label is an emoji. But language doesn't always just go with the white spaces.

Gretchen: Yeah, and the white spaces are themselves artificial because you learn to speak before you learn how to write. And when the words come out of your mouth in a speech stream you're not pausing between every single word the way you need to put white spaces between words when you write them. So “website” you say without a pause in between it regardless of what you do with the spacing.

I think the best quote that I have about what a word is, so it was back when I was teaching, and I had a student that came up to me about halfway through the intro course, and said “I'm really enjoying this course but the problem is, before taking linguistics I thought I knew what a word was. And now we've been getting into it more I just really have no idea!” And I said, “Congratulations, you've become a linguist!”

Because I would say, I went to a conference a couple years ago which was entirely about words and how they get put together, and someone made a joke to this room of a hundred or so linguists who all work specifically on words, saying, “Yeah, well, you know, nobody really knows what a word is.” And there was laughing and agreeing. So if you ask group of a linguists what a word is I don't think there's a clear consensus -- it's not clear when you should put spaces and when you shouldn't put spaces. It's clear that there are some things that definitely aren't words and some things that definitely are, but there's a lot of stuff on the margins.

Lauren: And that's even only in one language, let alone across the world's languages.

Gretchen: So instead of words, linguists tend to talk about units of meaning and units of sound and then you have a morpheme which is some unit of sound that also has a particular meaning. It's very clear that something is or isn't a morpheme, because it has some sort of sound associated with it and has some sort of meaning associated with it. And it doesn't matter whether that morpheme is attached to another morpheme or all by itself as a word, it’s still a unified thing to talk about. I've also realized we're talking about what's a word that I collaborated on a video with Tom Scott, who’s a YouTuber, about what even is a word and some of the different things that different languages do with different words.

We're going to put a link to that video in the show notes if you want to go check that out, and we will also of course be linking to a bunch of different discussions of words of the year.

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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm, transcripts and links to all the resources and media mentioned in this episode, go to Lingthusiasm dot com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and do feel free to leave us a review there. And you can follow at Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I can be found on Twitter @GretchenAMcC and my blog is All Things Linguistic dot com.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire, and our music is by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic!