The Global Language Monitor will be announcing the Top Global Fashion Capitals of the Decade thus far on Tuesday, February 7th, immediately preceding New York City’s Spring Fashion Week.
For a quick overview of the Guardian’s overview, please click on the logo below.
The Guardian
May 31, 2016
The Global Language Monitor research centre in Texas scours blogs, print mags, and social mediums for buzzwords associated with fashion, to produce a comprehensive annual ranking of the most fashion-oriented cities ….
The conquest of Global English is nearly complete. It is impossible to hold back this tide. The Tsunami of English has already swept over the earth. The question now is how to adjust to this new reality.
I have several suggestions. The first would be to master the language. Yes, acknowledge the sea-change, disassociate yourself from any political misgivings — and get on with it. Global English is here and now — and here to stay. Global English will reside, preside and thrive. At least in some form. Here are some possible threads of evolution (or devolution) of the language over the next 400 years. I chose this perspective because that is the same temporal distance we are from the days of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
Keeping in mind that the best way to predict the future is to read the past, here are a number of differing scenarios, one of which will be the future of Global English
1. Cyber English: The robots take control of the language. This form of English would be ‘clipped’ and very precise (no ‘fuzzy’ logic here). Come to think of it, this would be a great leap backward to the time of the King’s English, as spoken in, say, Colonial India.
2. The Romanticization of English: The Language devolves into various local dialects that in time become robust languages in themselves. The precedent for this, of course, is Latin splintering into the Romance Languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish). As Latin is still the Official Language of the Vatican City state, English will remain spoken in certain enclaves in North Carollina, western Virginia, and in the Desert Southwest.
3. Return to Proto-Indo-European. Not as outlandish as it might seem, as the Green movement decries the technological basis of much of Global English, and in a Back-to-Basics promotes the original P-I-E as a ‘green language’.
4. English captured by the Chinese: the Middle Kingdom strikes back and begins to stake a claim in English Language ownership, much as America has done so during the last century. The Chinese prove to be excellent caretakers of the language and develop many interesting ways to extend it throughout the Earth and beyond.
5. Revenge of the Nerds: Leetspeak Strikes Back. The Nerds control the language. All words have dozens of spellings and meanings. Letters, numbers and symbols intermix. Exposition is heavily encrypted. The precedent: The English language before the Noah Webster and the OED. Shakespeare’s many variations on his name is mere child’s play to the near-infinite variety of spelling your children’s children will be able to use for their names.
6. The Number of Words in the English Language
Academics will no longer fret at counting the number of words because the conquest of English will no longer be tainted by political, cultural, and social concerns. Once freed from these concerns, Everyone will be free to count words in the same manner that their scientific colleagues count the number of galaxies, stars and atomic nuclei.
We will then be able to count ALL the words: every name of every fungus, all the technical jargon, YouthSpeak, all the –Lishes, everything.
Dictionaries will not longer be the arbiters what’s a word? Questions of standing the test of time will be rendered inoperable. Words will bubble forth as a frothy sea-foam of insight and meaning. If a word is used by millions or even thousands of influential elites, regardless of class or any form of identity (gender, ethnic, class, national, or social) it will be deemed a word and recorded for posterity.
7. There will be no words only thoughts. This is a rather difficult scenario to explore, since words all but disappear. Dictionaries will be replaced by something much more ethereal, sort of like a directory of dreams, ideas and ideals.
The language will swell to tens of millions of ‘words’ and the fact of its crossing the 1,000,000, word barrier will be looked upon something quite quaint that happened in the ‘classic days’ of ‘Global English language (long before it assumed its then-current exalted position. In all probability, the words in this essay may seem closer to the works of Shakespeare and those of the King James Bible than those of the, say, twenty-fifth Century.
Austin, Texas, December 27, 2016 — One hundred years ago, in the year 1915 to be precise, a number of historical trends had already been set in motion that would come to dominate the rest of the century, for better or for ill. The Global Language Monitor, which tracks global trends though the Big Data-based analysis of Global English, has recently completed a three-year study to better ascertain what trends are we now tracking that will portend future events.
“The first fifteen years of the 20th c. set the trajectory for the remainder of the century — and beyond.” said Paul JJ Payack, president and Chief Word Analyst, the Global Language Monitor. “This included the seeds of World War, Bolshevism, Communism, German Nationalism, the carving up of the Middle East without regard to societal structures, total warfare, the introduction of weapons of mass destruction, flight, electrification of rural areas, the internal combustion engine, the dependence on hydrocarbon for fuel, Einstein’s first papers on relativity, the arms race, the explosive growth of cities, and so much more.
If the same can be said for the 21st century at the 15 year mark, what trends can we see that will be likely shape the rest of the 21st century, into the 22nd — and possibly beyond.”
The results for the First 15 Years of 21st Century & the Trends They Portend follow in the format of Rank, Word or Phrase, Comment, and Trend.They Portend
Top Words for the First 15 Years of 21st Century & the Trends They Portend
Rank
Word or Phrase
Comment
21st Century Trend
1
Web/Internet (2000)
Some argue the most momentous change to human society since the Renaissance — also reflected in language usage
Some argue the most momentous change to human society since the Renaissance. Web 2.0 was the tipping point where the Internet became embedded into everyday life.
2
China (2009)
2015 is the year that China surpasses the US as the Earth’s economic engine in terms of PPE. If China holds the title for as long as the US, it will be the year 2139 before it turns over the reigns.
The Rise of China will dominate 21st century geopolitical affairs like US in the 20th
3
Selfie (2013)
Evidently an ego-manical madness gripped the world in 2013-14.
The more people populate the planet, the greater the focus on the individual.
4
404 (2013)
The near-universal numeric code for failure on the global Internet.
404 will not merely signify the loss of an individual connection but the shutdown of whole sectors of society
5
9/11 (2001)
An inauspicious start to the 21st Century.
The early 20th c. saw the seeds of Bolshevism, German Nationalism, and Fascism. The seeds thus planted in the 21st c. are equally foreboding
6
OMG (2008)
One of the first texting expressions (Oh my God!), another was BFF as in Best Friend Forever
First sign that the Internet would change language. Basically the successor to Morse’s ‘What hath God Wrought?
7
Sustainable (’06)
The key to ‘Green’ living where natural resources are wisely conserved and thus never depleted.
Made small impact in 2006; its importance grows every year and will continue to do so as resources ARE depleted.
8
Hella (2008)
An intensive in Youthspeak, generally substituting for the word ‘very’ as in ‘hella expensive’
The world is being subdivided into the various tribes of youth (Trans national to follow.)
9
N00b (2009)
A beginner or ‘newbie’, with numbers (zeroes) replacing the letter Os, emphasizing a new trend in written English
The Geeks will inherit the Earth
10
Futebol (2011)
Ready or not, the World Cup of Futebol, Futbol, Football, and Soccer was on display in Brasil
The word Apocalypse has been in ascendance in English for some 500 years. However, recent years has witnessed an unprecedented resurgence
Wars and rumors of war appear to be the least of it
15
Occupy (2011)
‘Occupy’ has risen to pre-eminence through Occupy Movement, the occupation of Iraq, and the so-called ‘Occupied Territories’
The gulf between the haves and have nots, the North and the South, the 1% and all the rest has only worsened through a century of unprecedented economic, scientific and social progress
16
Tsunami (2004/5)
Southeast Asian Tsunami took 250,000 lives
The Southeast Asian Tsunami was a thirty-foot swell that resulted in a quarter of a million deaths. Might a 300-foot rise in sea-level engender a ‘slow Tsunami with deaths in the millions?
17
Inflation (Cosmic) (2014)
OK, so that the Universe expanded a gazillion times faster than the speed of light is now a fact. Way Cool.
At the beginning of the 20th c., scientists thought our local galaxy was the entire universe; since then our view of the universe has expanded a billion billion times
18
Singularity (2015)
Singularity was originally the name for Cosmic Genesis Event (the Big Bang),
Spoiler Alert: Now used to describe when computer intelligence surpasses that of humans (Possibly before mid-century).
19
Global Warming (2000)
Rated highly from Day One of the decade
The next few hundred (or few thousand) years are gong to be a longer haul than we can now imagine
Words without letters conveying emotional responses, such as smileys
Emoticons. Smileys, Emoji’s communication continues to evolve in unexpected ways
22
Emoji (2014)
In 500 years people will look back on the creation of a new alphabet (the alphaBIT): Letters + numbers + (emoticons) diacritical marks + emoji (picture words).
The arrival of the new English Alphabet (the AlphaBIT) is apparently at hand
23
Pope Francis (2013)
Also Top Name of the Year for 2013.
A new type of Pontiff sets the stage for all those Popes who follow …
24
WMD (2002)
Iraq’s (Non-existent) Weapons of Mass Destruction
The nuclear device dropped Hiroshima weighed tons, the new backpack versions, mere pounds.
25
Telomeres (2015)
Telomeres are the caps at the end of each strand of DNA that protect our chromosomes.
When telomeres wear away, the chromosomes are destroyed, and death ensues. The goal: protect telomeres, extend life
26
German Ascendance (2015)
One of the architects of the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel continues her reign as the most powerful woman on the planet
Germany’s tragic misadventures of the 20th c., belie its dominance of the Euro Zone in the 21st.
27
Anthropocene (2015)
A proposed geologic epoch when humans began to impact natural processes
An impact that will only grow for better or ill throughout the century.
28
God Particle (2011)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) continues its quest for the Higgs boson, popularly known as the God Particle.
Scientists have calculated a one in fifty million chance that the LHC will generate a small black hole that could devour the Earth.
29
Denier (2014)
An ugly new addition to the trending words list as it has become an evermore present invective with sinister overtones (fully intended).
Political discourse continues to sink to unprecedented levels
30
Carbon Footprint (2008)
The amount of carbon released in a process or activity
Burning a gallon of petrol produces enough CO² to melt 400 gallons of ice at the poles.
Slumdogs continue to multiply as MegaCities continue to seemingly endlessly expand
32
Truthiness (2006)
Steven Colbert’s addition to the language appears to be a keeper; While something may not meet the standard of truth, it certainly appears to be true
Truthiness seems to set the new standard, unfortunately
33
Change (2008)
The top political buzzword of the 2008 US Presidential campaign
Change will continue as a top word into the 22nd century — and beyond
34
Chinglish (2005)
The Chinese-English Hybrid language growing larger as Chinese influence expands
Chinese-English will inevitably cross-fertilize as the two great economic powers contend into the 22nd Century
35
Google (2007)
Founders misspelled actual word ‘googol’
Is Google the prototype of the a new “Idea foundry’
36
Twitter (2009)
The ability to encapsulate human thought in 140 characters
The ability to encapsulate human thought in wisps of wind (or electron streams) will almost certainly follow
37
H1N1 (2009)
More commonly known as Swine Flu
Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Ebola, it will only get worse with the hand of man only abetting the enemy
38
Bubble (2007)
One financial bubble after another as we move into the 21st century
Let’s see: Communism, socialism, fascism, command economies, the silent hand of the market, China’s hybrid — evidently the business cycle will persist
39
The Great War (2014)
The centennial of World War I begins four years of soulful commemorations — as the forces it unloosed continue to ripple into (and most probably through) the 21st c.
As the Great War (and the ravages thereof} continue into the 21st c., what at the odds that its ramifications will continue throughout the 21st
40
Political Transparency (2007)
A noble idea from the Campaign that was among the first casualties of the Obama Administration
The explosion of knowledge portends less transparency not more …
The words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.83 billion speakers (January 2013 estimate) GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis. NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 300,000 print and electronic global media, as well as new social media sources as they emerge.
About the Global Language Monitor
Early in the last century, The Global Language Monitor (GLM) was founded in Silicon Valley by Paul J.J. Payack on the understanding that new technologies and techniques were necessary for truly understanding the world of Big Data, as it is now known. Silicon Valley is located in what is now the CaliMinor Federation.
Today, from its home in Austin, Texas GLM provides a number of innovative products and services that utilize its ‘algorithmic services’ to help worldwide customers protect, defend and nurture their branded products and entities. Products include ‘brand audits’ to assess the current status, establish baselines, and competitive benchmarks for current intellectual assets and brands, and to defend products against ambush marketing.
These services are currently provided to the Fortune 500, the Higher Education market, high technology firms, the worldwide print and electronic media, and the global fashion industry, among others.
Top Trending Words and Phrases of 2016, Thus Far: Bigly, Brexit & Non-binary
AUSTIN, Texas July 15-17, 2016 – Bigly, Brexit, and ‘Non-binary’ lead the Top Trending Words and Phrases of 2016 thus far, followed by the Prince Symbol, Zika, Gun Violence / Gun Culture, Safe Place, Heroin and fentanyl according to the current word trends in global English being tracked by the Global Language Monitor, the big data, trend tracking consultancy.
This is preliminary to GLM’s fourteenth annual Word of the Year (#WOTY) rankings that will be released on November 16, 2016.
“By the sixteenth year of the 20th century, the world was already awash in the trends that would influence the rest of the century, reaching all the way into the early 21st century.” said Paul JJ Payack, chief word analyst, the Global Language Monitor. “The twenty-first century trends that accompany these words might similarly portend far greater events than they represent today..”
The Top Trending Words of 2016 are listed below (Rank, Word, and Comment).
Top Trending Words for 2016, thus far.
Rank, Word, Commentary
1. Bigly — Things trending larger … bigly. Almost everything trended bigly thus far in 2016 from politics and foreign affairs, to terrorism and gun violence,
2, Brexit — The British Exit from the European Union provides a new vocabulary for future political breakups: Scotxit, Quebecxit and, even, Texit.
3. Non-binary — A legal term for a gender identity between male and female
4. Perhaps the first emoji. The unpronounceable symbol representing the singer formerly known as Prince.
5. Zika — Please note that Rio is not on this list; its spot was taken by the Zika Virus. A potential global pandemic with Rio as its epicenter.
6. Gun Culture / Gun Violence — Gun Culture/Gun Violence are neck-and neck in the ranking here.
7. Safe Place — In the US, places where students can retreat to avoid hearing unpleasant words; in the world, places protected from rape, crucifixion, being sold into slavery, and the like.
8. Heroin and Fentanyl — More deaths from opioids in the US than gun violence and auto accidents combined. Where is the outrage?
9. Hooya ha tah iti bin — “Son please don’t smuggle yourself.” Transliteration of a Somali mother’s plea to her son not to join the refugee flow into Europe.
10. Memory Care — Current euphemism for Alzheimer care.
11. Presumptive — Presumptive Republican nominee, presumptive Democratic nominee, presumptive prime minister, etc. In 2016 the word ‘presumptive’ is bigly.
12. Texticate — Facebook, messaging, twitter, email … everything is reduced to text… the textication of the world as we know it.
13. Clintonworld — The private world of Hil and Bill where many of the laws of the political world seem to be suspended. Cf. Steve Job’s ‘reality distortion field’.
14. Trumpism — The emerging political philosophy of the presumptive Republican candidate,whatever that may be.
15. Tennessine — New element on the periodic table, with Atomic number 117 and the symbol Ts. Some wags say to honor Bluegrass, more likely the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Others under consideration a number of trending words that not yet meet the triple threshold test, but might qualify as the year further unfolds.
In December 2015, Austin, Texas-based GLM announced that Microaggression in its various manifestations was the Top Word of 2015.— The brief, everyday exchanges that send mostly unintended derogatory messages to members of various minority groups.
Related to the following terms:
Safe Space — In universities protecting students feelings by warning of subject matter that might elicit discomfit or distress.
Trigger — Any action that might elicit feelings of discomfit or distress.
Unsafe — The feelings a student encounters when without warning they are confronted with subject matter or situations that have elicited feelings of discomfit or distress.
Snowflake — What unconcerned students call those with the need for safe spaces and warnings about possible trigger events.
Migrant Crisis was the Top Phrase of 2015, while Donald J. Trump, was the surprise Top Name of 2015.
To see the Top Words of 2015, and the Top Words, Phrases, and Names of the 21st century go here.
The words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.83 billion speakers (January 2013 estimate) GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis. NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 300,000 print and electronic global media, as well as new social media sources as they emerge.
About the Global Language Monitor
In 2003, The Global Language Monitor (GLM) was founded in Silicon Valley by Paul J.J. Payack on the understanding that new technologies and techniques were necessary for truly understanding the world of Big Data, as it is now known.
Today, from its home in Austin, Texas GLM provides a number of innovative products and services that utilize its ‘algorithmic services’ to help worldwide customers protect, defend and nurture their branded products and entities. Products include ‘brand audits’ to assess the current status, establish baselines, and competitive benchmarks for current intellectual assets and brands, and to defend products against ambush marketing.
These services are currently provided to the Fortune 500, the Higher Education market, high technology firms, the worldwide print and electronic media, as well as the global fashion industry, among others.
For more information, call 1.512.815.8836, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit www.LanguageMonitor.com.
Web 2.0 beats Jai Ho & N00b as 1,000,000th English Word
English passed the Million Word mark earlier today, June 10 at 10:22 am GMT
Word Number 1,000,001: Financial Tsunami
Austin, Texas June 10, 2009 – The Global Language Monitor today announced that Web2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000th English word or phrase. added to the codex of fourteen hundred-year-old language. Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. It has crossed from technical jargon into far wider circulation in the last six months. Two terms from India, Jai Ho! and slumdog finished No. 2 and 4. Jai Ho! Is a Hindi exclamation signifying victory or accomplishment; Slumdog is an impolite term for children living in the slums. Just missing the top spot was n00b, a mixture of letters and numbers that is a derisive term for newcomer. It is also the only mainstream English word that contains within itself two numerals. Just missing the final five cut-off, was another technical term, cloud computing, meaning services that are delivered via the cloud. At its current rate, English generates about 14.7 words a day or one every 98 minutes.
‘Millionth English word’ declared
A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be Web 2.0, a term for the latest generation of web products and services.
Matt Frei reports on English’s unique linguistic evolution and then spoke to Global Language Monitor’s Paul Payack who helped find this millionth English word.
BBC NEWS | Programmes | World News America | ‘Millionth English word’ declared
“As expected, English crossed the 1,000,000 word threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am GMT. However, some 400 years after the death of the Bard, the words and phrases were coined far from Stratford-Upon-Avon, emerging instead from Silicon Valley, India, China, and Poland, as well as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK,” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “English has become a universal means of communication; never before have so many people been able to communicate so easily with so many others.” The English language is now being studies by hundreds of millions around the globe for entertainment, commercial or scientific purposes. In 1960 there were some 250 million English speakers, mostly in former colonies and the Commonwealth countries. The future of English as a major language was very much in doubt. Today, some 1.53 billion people now speak English as a primary, auxiliary, or business language, with some 250 million acquiring the language in China alone.
These are the fifteen finalists for the one millionth English word, all of which have met the criteria of a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution, and depth of citations. 1,000,000: Web 2.0 – The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you. 999,999: Jai Ho! – The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as “It is accomplished”. Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire”. 999,998: N00b — From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term. 999,997: Slumdog – a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India. 999,996: Cloud Computing – The ‘cloud’ has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage. 999,995: Carbon Neutral — One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change. 999,994: Slow Food — Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores). 999,993: Octomom – The media phenomenon relating to the travails of the mother of the octuplets. 999,992: Greenwashing – Re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly. 999,991: Sexting – Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content. 999,990: Shovel Ready – Projects are ready to begin immediately upon the release of federal stimulus funds. 999,989: Defriend – Social networking terminology for cutting the connection with a formal friend. 999,988: Chengguan – Urban management officers, a cross between mayors, sheriff, and city managers. 999,987: Recessionista – Fashion conscious who use the global economic restructuring to their financial benefit. 999,986: Zombie Banks – Banks that would be dead if not for government intervention and cash infusion. ——————————————————————————————————— In addition, the 1,000,001st word is Financial Tsunami – The global financial restructuring that seemingly swept out of nowhere, wiping out trillions of dollars of assets, in a matter of months Each word was analyzed to determine which depth (number of citations) and breadth (geographic extent of word usage), as well as number of appearances in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, the blogosphere, and social media (such as Twitter and YouTube). The Word with the highest PQI score was deemed the 1,000,000th English language word. The Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) is used to track and analyze word usage. Global Language Monitor has been tracking English word creation since 2003. Once it identifies new words (or neologisms) it measures their extent and depth of usage with its PQI technology.
Attention: Embargoed until Tuesday, November 3, 2116. Call for exceptions. info@LanguageMonitor.com or 001 512 801-6823
Austin, Texas Federation, November 3, 2116 — The Galactic Language Monitor (GLM), which tracks global trends though the Big Data-based analysis of Global English, has recently completed its 116th annual global survey.
These words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 3.83 billion speakers (January 2116 estimate) GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis.
NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 300,000 print and electronic global media, as well as new social media sources as they emerge.
The Top Words of 2116 came from the Seven Continents, and Earth Outposts on the Chinese Moon base, the US station on Mars, and the Titan and Ganymede field stations, as well as Pluto Outpost 1. The Joint Interstellar Mission is currently in the deep space silence period.
The results follow in the format of Rank, Word or Phrase, and Comment.
1
RFUS
Name of the USA since the Great Re-federalization of the 2060s into 14 Federations (hence the new name).
2
Extinction
The fourth Global extinction has been declared over, with species apparently stabilization, a loss of some 400,000 species since the beginning of the 21st Century.
3
Global Warming/Climate Change
Common sense actually takes hold after the atmospheric temperature chart of the last 400,000 years and the land chart of 25,000-15,000 BCE (when the seas were some 300 feet lower as evidenced by the Bering Land Bridge) are accepted as the basis of discussion.
5
Pope Francis V
After the relatively short reign of Pope Francis I, the following four pontiffs, attempt to recapture the ‘magic’.
Doomsday Asteroid
Extra attention since Rogue 23 struck Inavit in 2087.
6
JNZE
Contention over the Jerusalem Neutral Zone Enclave continues; however all religions still enjoy freedom of worship.
7
Nuclear Proliferation
Spread of weapons beyond the Nuclear 10 continues (current Nuclear 10: US, UK, France, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia).(North Korea was disarmed in 2039).
8
Same-old, Same old
Phrase is popularized after US Presidential Election seems to be shaping up as Paul Walker Bush vs. Joseph James Obama for 2116 (after Joseph P. Kennedy IV and William Rodman “Bill” Clinton III withdrew.)
9
China Unbound
China’s economy has stabilized after its economy resumed robust growth after several decades of stagnation. There is talk of it replacing the US Federation as the largest world economy, again.
10
Supervolcano
After the close call with the Yellowstone Cauldron where only 1.3M died, the nations of the world begin take necessary actions.
11
Polar Vortex
Since the first Internet-age struck in 2014, the phenomenon has been repeated dozens of times around the world.
12
Scots Style
A new term introduced after Free Scotland asks to join the RFUS after being shunned by England for most of the 21st century.
13
World War I
World War I is finally after it lasting reverberations disappear at the 200 year mark.
14
524 Million
Total body count from the hemorrhagic fever outbreaks early in the century are now approaching 524 million persons. The WHO estimates that they are confident it will be in control in the next 6 months or so.
15
Sykes-Picot Lines
The “lines in the sand” are still raising havoc after 200 years
Early in the last century, The Global Language Monitor (GLM) was founded in Silicon Valley by Paul J.J. Payack on the understanding that new technologies and techniques were necessary for truly understanding the world of Big Data, as it is now known. Silicon Valley is located in what is now the CaliMinor Federation.
Today, from its home in Austin, Texas GLM provides a number of innovative products and services that utilize its ‘algorithmic services’ to help worldwide customers protect, defend and nurture their branded products and entities. Products include ‘brand audits’ to assess the current status, establish baselines, and competitive benchmarks for current intellectual assets and brands, and to defend products against ambush marketing.
These services are currently provided to the Fortune 500, the Higher Education market, high technology firms, the worldwide print and electronic media, and the global fashion industry, among others.
The English Language passed the Million Word threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 a.m. (GMT). The Millionth Word was the controversial ‘Web 2.0′. Currently there is a new word created every 98 minutes or about 14.7 words per day.
A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be Web 2.0, a term for the latest generation of web products and services.
Matt Frei reports on English’s unique linguistic evolution and then spoke to Global Language Monitor’s Paul Payack who helped find this millionth English word.
BBC NEWS | Programmes | World News America | ‘Millionth English word’ declared
“As expected, English crossed the 1,000,000 word threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am GMT. However, some 400 years after the death of the Bard, the words and phrases were coined far from Stratford-Upon-Avon, emerging instead from Silicon Valley, India, China, and Poland, as well as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK,” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “English has become a universal means of communication; never before have so many people been able to communicate so easily with so many others.” The English language is now being studies by hundreds of millions around the globe for entertainment, commercial or scientific purposes. In 1960 there were some 250 million English speakers, mostly in former colonies and the Commonwealth countries. The future of English as a major language was very much in doubt. Today, some 1.53 billion people now speak English as a primary, auxiliary, or business language, with some 250 million acquiring the language in China alone.
There are 10,000 other stories hailing the arrival of the 1,000,000th word from Abu Dhabi, and Tehran, to Beijing, to Sydney, to Chicago and Sri Lanka.
Quote of the Week:
“What’s interesting about a million is that it’s such a tiny number compared to all the words we could have,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading who studies the comings and goings of words across history. (Using any combination of seven consonants with two vowels, for example, creates more than 100-million potential words.) But even with a relatively small pile to call on, words are mostly fleeting. (The Oxford English Dictionary has a list of words that have appeared on record only once in hundreds of years.) A small number of essential words such as “two” or “you” – or their variations – are ancients in the language family, Dr. Pagel said. “Had you been wandering around the plains of Eurasia 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, you probably could have said ‘thou’ and someone would have know you were referring to them. We think that’s pretty astonishing.” Toronto Globe and Mail, June, 2008
Why Twitter was not in running for the 1,000,000th word
Austin, Texas June 13, 2009 – Since the 1,000,000th word in the English announcement earlier this week, a number of news organizations have inquired as to why Twitter, the prominent microblog, was not on the final list of words considered for No. 1,000,000. According to Paul JJ Payack, president and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor, “The answer is quite straight-forward: Twitter is already a word, as is its companion, to tweet. Certainly, the 21st century definition of twittering is much different than that of the Middle English twiteren, which is similar to the Old High German zwizzirōn, both of which mean, well, to twitter or as Merriam-Webster’s defines it “to utter successive chirping noises” or “to talk in a chattering fashion”. Since it is already catalogued as a headword, 21st c. twittering is simply a new entry, a new definition, under the ancient headword, twitter”.
On June 10, the Global Language Monitor announced that Web 2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000th English word or phrase added to the codex of fourteen hundred-year-old language.
Web 2.0 beats Jai Ho & N00b as 1,000,000th English Word
English passed the Million Word mark earlier today, June 10 at 10:22 am GMT
Word Number 1,000,001: Financial Tsunami
Austin, Texas June 10, 2009 – The Global Language Monitor today announced that Web 2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000th English word or phrase. added to the codex of fourteen hundred-year-old language. Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. It has crossed from technical jargon into far wider circulation in the last six months. Two terms from India, Jai Ho! and slumdog finished No. 2 and 4. Jai Ho! Is a Hindi exclamation signifying victory or accomplishment; Slumdog is an impolite term for children living in the slums. Just missing the top spot was n00b, a mixture of letters and numbers that is a derisive term for newcomer. It is also the only mainstream English word that contains within itself two numerals. Just missing the final five cut-off, was another technical term, cloud computing, meaning services that are delivered via the cloud. At its current rate, English generates about 14.7 words a day or one every 98 minutes.
These are the fifteen finalists for the one millionth English word, all of which have met the criteria of a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution, and depth of citations.
1,000,000: Web 2.0 – The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you. 999,999: Jai Ho! – The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as “It is accomplished”. Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire”. 999,998: N00b — From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term. 999,997: Slumdog – a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India. 999,996: Cloud Computing – The ‘cloud’ has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage. 999,995: Carbon Neutral — One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change. 999,994: Slow Food — Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores). 999,993: Octomom – The media phenomenon relating to the travails of the mother of the octuplets. 999,992: Greenwashing – Re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly. 999,991: Sexting – Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content. 999,990: Shovel Ready – Projects are ready to begin immediately upon the release of federal stimulus funds. 999,989: Defriend – Social networking terminology for cutting the connection with a formal friend. 999,988: Chengguan – Urban management officers, a cross between mayors, sheriff, and city managers. 999,987: Recessionista – Fashion conscious who use the global economic restructuring to their financial benefit. 999,986: Zombie Banks – Banks that would be dead if not for government intervention and cash infusion. ——————————————————————————————————— In addition, the 1,000,001st word is Financial Tsunami – The global financial restructuring that seemingly swept out of nowhere, wiping out trillions of dollars of assets, in a matter of months. Each word was analyzed to determine which depth (number of citations) and breadth (geographic extent of word usage), as well as number of appearances in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, the blogosphere, and social media (such as Twitter and YouTube). The Word with the highest PQI score was deemed the 1,000,000th English language word. The Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) is used to track and analyze word usage. Global Language Monitor has been tracking English word creation since 2003. Once it identifies new words (or neologisms) it measures their extent and depth of usage with its PQI technology.
English Language Millionth Word Finalists Announced, including: alcopops, bangster, de-friend, n00b, quendy-trendy, slumdog, and wonderstar
English to Pass Millionth Word June 10 at 10:22 am GMT
Million Word March Now Stands at 999,824
Austin, Texas May 29, 2009 – The Global Language Monitor today announced the finalists for the Million Word March. The English Language will cross the 1,000,000 word threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am Stratford-Upon-Avon time.
“The Million Word milestone brings to notice the coming of age of English as the first, truly global Language”, said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “There are three major trends involving the English language today: 1) An explosion in word creation; English words are being added to the language at the rate of some 14.7 words a day; 2) a geographic explosion where some 1.53 billion people now speak English around the globe as a primary, auxiliary, or business language; and 3) English has become, in fact, the first truly global language.”
Due to the global extent of the English language, the Millionth Word is as likely to appear from India, China, or East L.A.as it is to emerge from Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare’s home town). The final words and phrases under consideration are listed below. These words represent each of the categories of Global English that GLM tracks, Since English appears to be adding a new word every 98 minutes or about 14.7 words a day, the Global Language Monitor is selecting a representative sampling. You can follow the English Language WordClock counting down to the one millionth word at www.LanguageMonitor.com.
These words that are on the brink of entering the language as the finalists for the One Millionth English Word:
Australia: Alchopops – Sugary-flavored mixed drinks very much en vogue.
Chinglish: Chengguan – Urban management officers, a cross between mayors, sheriff, and city managers.
Economics: 1) Financial Tsunami – The global financial restructuring that seemingly swept out of nowhere, wiping out trillions of dollars of assets, in a matter of months. 2) Zombie Banks – Banks that would be dead if not for government intervention and cash infusion.
Entertainment: Jai Ho! — From the Hindi, “it is accomplished’ achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winner, “Slumdog Millionaire”.
Fashion: 1) Chiconomics – The ability to maintain one’s fashion sense (chicness) amidst the current financial crisis. 2) Recessionista – Fashion conscious who use the Global economic restructuring to their financial benefit; 3) Mobama – relating to the fashion-sense of the US First Lady, as in ‘that is quite mobamaish’.
Popular Culture: Octomom (the media phenomenon of the mother of the octuplets).
Green Living: 1) Green washing – Re-branding an old product as environmentally friendly. 2) E-vampire – Appliances and machines on standby-mode, which continually use electrical energy they ‘sleep’. 3) Slow food: — Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores).
Hinglish: Chuddies – Ladies’ underwear or panties.
Internet: 1) De-follow – No longer following the updates of someone on a social networking site. 2) De-friend – No longer following the updates of a friend on a social networking site; much harsher than de-following. 3) Web 2.0 – The next generation of web services.
Language: Toki Pona – The only language (constructed or natural) with a trademark.
Million Word March: MillionWordWord — Default entry if no other word qualifies.
Music: Wonderstar – as in Susan Boyle, an overnight sensation, exceeding all reasonable expectations.
Poland: Bangsters – A description of those responsible for ‘predatory’ lending practices, from a combination of the words banker and gangster.
Politically incorrect: 1) Slumdog – a formerly disparaging comments upon those residing in the slums of India; Seatmates of size – US airline euphemism for passengers who carry enough weight to require two seats.
Politics: 1) Carbon neutral — One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change. 2) Overseas Contingency Operations – The Obama re-branding of the Bush War on Terror.
Sports: Phelpsian – The singular accomplishments of Michael Phelps at the Beijing Olympics.
Spirituality: Renewalist – Movements that encompass renewal of the spirit; also call ‘Spirit-filled’ movements.
Technology: 1) Cloud Computing – The ‘cloud’ has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage. 2) N00b — From the Gamer Community; a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term. 3) Sexting – Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content.
YouthSpeak: Quendy-Trendy — British youth speak for hip or up-to-date.
Extra Credit:
French word with least chance of entering English Language: le courriel for E-Mail.
Most recognized English-language word on the planet: O.K.
Each word is being analyzed to determine which is attaining the greatest depth (number of citations) and breadth (geographic extent of word usage), as well as number appearances in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, the blogosphere, and social media (such as Twitter and YouTube). The Word with the highest PQI score will be deemed the 1,000,000th English language word. The Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) is used to track and analyze word usage.
Global Language Monitor has been tracking English word creation since 2003. Once it identifies new words (or neologisms) it measures their extent and depth of usage with its PQI technology.
In Shakespeare’s day, there were only 2,000,000 speakers of English and fewer than 100,000 words. Shakespeare himself coined about 1,700 words. Thomas Jefferson invented about 200 words, and George W. Bush created a handful, the most prominent of which is, misunderestimate. US President Barack Obama’s surname passed into wordhood last year with the rise of obamamania.
It’s difficult to track the number of words in the English language, since neologisms–new words–are coined every day. The Global Language Monitor claims our lexicon will welcome its millionth word by the end of this month; other experts disagree.Whenever it does occur, will the millionth word be something from the business world, like “carpocalypse,” describing the state of the automotive industry? Or from Hollywood, like “momager,” the mother of a celebrity who also serves as business manager? In these stories, we look at our changing language and highlight some of the new words that have entered it.
There are fewer than 100,000 words in the French language;
There are some some 6.5 billion folks on the planet; (and about 20 billion that have ever walked upon the Earth);
Fewer than 20,000 different words in the Bible, (actually, 12,143 in the English, 783,137 total in the King James Version, 8,674 in the Hebrew Old Testament, and 5,624 in the Greek New Testament);
And 24,000 differing words to be found in the complete works of Shakespeare, about 1,700 of which he invented.
Finally, if you emptied all the water out of Lake Tahoe and spread it evenly over all of California it would be about 14 inches deep, Not that anyone would ever attempt to do so. Or actually care.
Which brings us to the number of words in English.
The central idea of writing is, of course, the idea. Ideas by their very nature are wispy sorts of things. This being so, you can’t grab an idea and do with it what you will. Rather the best for which one can hope is to encapsulate the idea and preserve it for time immemorial in some sort of ethereal amber. We call this amber, language; the basic building block of which is, of course, the word. (We are speaking now as poets and not as linguists.)
As such, writers of English have the good fortune of having hundreds of thousands of words from which to choose. When you think of it, the English language writer always has at least three words for any idea, each rooted in the Latin, the Germanic or Saxon tongues, and the Greek. Think of a word for human habitation: city, town, metropolis, and so on. And that’s just the start. In the English-speaking world we also owe a heavy debtto Algonquin, and Hebrew, and Malay (ketchup anyone?) and Maori, and Zulu and Hmong among a multitude of others. I think you can spot the beginnings of a trend here.
And then there is the entire realm of ”jargon,” scientific and otherwise, those specialized patois or vocabularies known only to those in specific fields. Computer-related jargon is multiplying at an extraordinary rate. And since English has become the lingua Franca of the Internet, English words are being created and non-English words co-opted at an ever-quickening pace.
Scientists estimate that there are approximately 10,000,000,000 neurons in a typical human brain. Each of these neurons can theorectically interconnect with all the rest.
This being so, the number of interconnects within a single human brain is greater than the entire number of atomic particles in the universe.
If you equate these interconnects to ideas, or even thoughts, the number of potential words needed to express them is, indeed, staggering on the order of billions and billions of trillions.
This being said, I now unequivocally state that as of the 10th day of June in the year 2009 AD (or CE, whatever your preference), we estimate that there were some 1,000,000 words in the English language, plus or minus a handful.
Global Language Monitor’s Ninth Biennial List of Top Politically (in)Correct Words for 2016 and 2015
“House Masters” No More
Follows the lead of Los Angeles County Purchasing Department in 2004.
Austin, Texas, 2016 — Harvard University captured the Top Politically (in)Correct Word of the Year Award in the Global Language Monitor’s Ninth Biennial List for 2016 and 2015.
Harvard won the award for supplanting the ancient and honored title of “House Master” for the rather amorphous yet politically neutral title of ‘faculty dean’. Harvard undergraduates live in residence dorms called ‘houses’ modeled on the colleges of Oxbridge and other Medieval European universities.
Of course, when Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael D. Smith announced the change, he responded to criticism that the change reflected a misunderstanding of the word “master” as possibly connected to America’s history of slavery, Not so, he contended. “None of these [contentions] could be farther from the truth”. Nota Bene: Harvard’s motto is a single word ‘Veritas,’ Latin for Truth.
The unanswered question remains, what, if anything, the university plans to do with the more than 4,000 masters degrees awarded at Harvard’s 365th Commencement on May 26, 2016, let alone the tens of thousands awarded over the last three centuries.
Of course, the Harvard administration’s decision was not without precedent, it followed the actions of the Los Angeles County Purchasing department. In computer terminology, “master/slave” refers to primary and secondary hard disk drives. But a Los Angeles County purchasing department told vendors in late 2003 that the term was offensive and violated the region’s cultural diversity. The county’s department of affirmative action undertook a hunt to replace it on software product packaging. After a public uproar, the county backed down. Payack said that while the incident took place in late 2003, the debate about it continued into 2004.
“We label these words and phrases Politically (in)Correct because of the fierce debate they often stir and incur,” said Paul JJ Payack, president and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “People spanning the political spectrum can find the phrases politically ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ depending on their particular views”.
The University also placed a plaque naming four slaves who labored for two of its presidents some of its buildings in the 17th and 18th centuries. The plaque ‘honored’ four people: Titus, Venus, Juba, and Bilhah. No surnames were ever recorded, while first names were adopted from those used in imperial Rome. Bilhah was listed in the President’s journal as a “Negro Wench”.
In a related case, a Harvard Law School committee proposed to retire the school’s shield (crest) that was adopted in 1936. The contention was that it was modeled on the family crest of the slave-holding Royall family. The Royall family endowed Harvard’s first professorship of law.
The shield, itself consists of a stylized Veritas written on three books with three sheafs of wheat. The connection to slavery is nowhere implied.
Historical Note: After slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts, the school continued to prosper from the mills throughout New England that used the cotton which the slaves produced as well as the oils obtained from the near extinction of the whales, as well as the land appropriated from the local native American tribes.
Meanwhile, dozens of colleges and universities around the country experienced disruptions about historical associations to slavery and crimes against Native Americans.
The Top Politically (in)Correct Words of 2015 -2016 follow:
Harvard University changed the titles of the leadership of it Residential System ‘Houses’ from ‘Masters’ to ‘faculty deans’.
Harvard Law School is dropping the design of its ‘shield’ because it was based upon that of the slave-holding Royall family.
Non-binary — A legal term for a gender identity between male and female.
Cisgender is a newly popular term for one whose gender identity matches their sex.
Gettysburg College shows a video to incoming first-year students “who identify as male” (freshman) on “toxic masculinity”.
According to 35 Dumb Things Well-Intended People Say: complimenting someone as being well-spoken.can be taken as a micro-aggression.
A sign at Pomona College:advised students to “acknowledge your privilege” and “apologize if you’ve used words like “sassy”. Additionally, the sign claims that all white people are racist. “Understand that you are white, so it is inevitable that you have unconsciously learned racism,” states the poster. “Your unearned advantage must be acknowledged and your racism unlearned.”
Indigenous People’s Day—which serves as a counter-celebration to Columbus Day in order to celebrate Native American culture and history—has steadily increased in popularity since its founding in the 1990s, with major cities, such as Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, and the state of Alaska. Brown Unversity faculty members endorsed a student suggestion to rename Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The idea took a quarter of a century to arrive at the Ivy League university.
The Patriarchy as a governing societal structure is to be questioned on all levels.
Amherst College is dropping the “Lord Jeff (rey Amherst)” nickname because of Lord Jeffrey’s ties to eradication efforts kill Native Americans by distributing smallpox-contaminated blankets to them. There has been no word of changing the name of the college, itself.
These Politically (in)Correct words are automatically nominated to Global Language Monitor’s 17th Annual Word of the Year #WOTY announcement for Global English at year’s end.
The words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.83 billion speakers (January 2013 estimate) GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis. NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 300,000 print and electronic global media, as well as new social media sources as they emerge.
About the Global Language Monitor
In 2003, The Global Language Monitor (GLM) was founded in Silicon Valley by Paul J.J. Payack on the understanding that new technologies and techniques were necessary for truly understanding the world of Big Data, as it is now known. Previous to this Payack was the founding president at yourDictionary.com, and a senior executive for a number of leading high tech companies.
Today, from its home in Austin, Texas GLM provides a number of innovative products and services that utilize its ‘algorithmic services’ to help worldwide customers protect, defend and nurture their branded products and entities. Products include ‘brand audits’ to assess the current status, establish baselines, and competitive benchmarks for current intellectual assets and brands, and to defend products against ambush marketing.
These services are currently provided to the Fortune 500, the Higher Education market, high technology firms, the worldwide print and electronic media, and the global fashion industry, among others.
For More Information email info@languageMonitor.com.
GLM has been tracking the Outsider since at least 2006
This article is an accounting of the Global Language Monitor’s public record of the rise of the underlying forces that have disrupted long-held economic theories and political assumptions. These forces recently culminated in the election of what we are calling The Outsider to the presidency of the United States. We are citing published accounts only (The Hill, New York Times, BBC, NPR) to highlight the predictive ability of our Trend Tracking and Narrative Tracking technologies. We are updating this article daily, extending the story in chronological order. We are presently citing the underlying forces in the run-up to the election of Barack Obama that presage the events of 2016.
In the meantime, if you would like an interview or any additional information, please call 001.512.801.6823 or reach out to us through email at info@LanguageMonitor.com.
Austin, TEXAS, November 8, 2016 — Though there appears to be great shock around the world that an ‘outsider’ has actually captured the White House, to this organization an Outsider’s path to victory was foreseeable from the start. — actually at least since 2006. It was five years earlier that China had been admitted into the fellowship of the world’s major trading blocks and by ‘06 it was as if the West had been struck by a five trillion (then twelve-trillion, now fifteen trillion-) dollar rogue asteroid that both astronomers and economists had missed.
Since that time, the economies of the West have witnessed entire industries being destabilized, shackled and shuttered. And before anyone truly understood the true economic implications, vast areas of once thriving cities, states, and regions had been transformed into seemingly post-apocalyptic wastelands.
There is a particular type of nuclear weapon that is seldom mentioned because it is considered an especially hideous — the neutron bomb. The sole purpose of the neutron bomb is to destroy any and all forms of life while leaving the man-made infrastructure (factories, hospitals, schools and the like) untouched and in place.
A quick imaginary flyover of the US reveals burned out factories of Detroit, the abandoned steel mills of the Allegheny and Ohio Valleys, the shuttered coal mines in the hidden hollows (and the mountain-topped towns) of Appalachia, the empty Main streets opioid-addled and addicted towns of New England will help you assess the devastation wrecked by a neutron bomb for yourself. (See A Recession Neither great Nor Small published in TheHill.)
Western History has long celebrated the decency of the common man from the amphitheaters of Athens, to the fisherman-disciples of Jesus, the Noble Savage of the Enlightenment, the citizens of the Founders, and the proletariat of the New Socialist Man. Now, when the millions of the dispossessed cried out in anguish and pain, they were decried as out-of-step with the post-Modern world, as racists, as Luddites, and uneducable. You will not find any contemporary Aaron Copeland, dare writing and performing a new “Fanfare for the Common Man,” without being hooted off the stage.
And yet some wonder why since the turn of the century there has been a swelling undercurrent, a seething restlessness, a mostly hidden wellspring of anger, vitriol and disappointment making its way through the body politic. All too often, this undercurrent was dismissed as irrelevant, inconsequential and certainly not worthy of serious consideration, let alone study.
In 2016 the West is experiencing a populist uprising, not seen since the barricades, protests, riots, and assassinations of 1968, though this cycle is decidedly more peaceful, with the anger, rage and frustration thus far, channeled through the ballot box.
At first observers had the luxury of blaming this undercurrent on forces outside an individual’s control: 9/11, the Iraq War, G.W. Bush (and Dick Cheney), the Global War on Terrorism and the elusive Osama bin Laden, the Housing Bubble, Lehman Brothers, and the beginning of the Great Recession, which was actually just another manifestation of the Global Economic Restructuring.
At the time, the election of Barack Obama was heralded as a full stop in History, a break with the past, the dawn of a new post-racial era, certainly in the US, if not the world, even as an avatar of a new age. But trouble was brewing, as GLM, seeming alone had picked up, (See Trend: Disillusionment, Anger & Outrage on the Rise Since Obama’s Inauguration.)
*****
Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief Word Analyst said at the time that “The disillusionment, anger and outrage should not be a surprise, especially to students of political language, who have been analyzing what is being said in the political realm over the last 18 months. (That this comes as a revelation to our political elites, however, should serve, once again, as a sobering lesson or, even, cautionary tale.)”
Though little noticed by the media, GLM found that in early February, just weeks after the Obama inauguration, the ‘words of despair and fear relating to the global economic meltdown were drowning out those of hope in the global media in the ninety days since the US presidential election on November 4, 2008’. In its analysis of the global print and electronic media since the US presidential election, GLM found that those words were used with 18-23% more frequency than compared to their use in the ninety days following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 of 2001 and 90-days following the beginning of the Iraq War in March 2003. (Even the word fear, itself, was at some 85% of the level it was used in the aftermath of both the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks and the onset of the Iraq War.)
In a related study Global Language Monitor found that the word ‘outrage’ had been used more in the global media that month than anytime this century, with the previous benchmark being the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In particular, the word was used in association with the AIG bonuses, which had recently been distributed.
GLM examined the global print and electronic media for the seven days after the following events: the 9/11 terrorist attacks in, the start of the Iraq War, and the week after the Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.
*****
GLM’s analysis shows that these undercurrents of Disillusionment, Anger & Outrage on the rise Since Obama’s Inauguration.could be found in earlier data, underscoring the strength and significance of the find.
Now, some eight years into the ‘new era’ the news has been full of various elites’ recriminations about how they got it so wrong. These apologia have been characterized as revelations, surprises, astonishments, and/or mis-measurements. Translation: the measuring of data no longer meaningful, undergirded by assumptions about a world that no longer (If it ever) existed.
The Global Language Monitor has been tracking the disruptive undercurrent that has been seething beneath the surface of the 21st century, theories, speculations, and statistical analysis since the housing crisis — two years before the first Obama Inauguration.
GLM charted the meteoric rise of the charismatic and charming political star, we also tracked the burgeoning undercurrent that followed from the crash of the Housing Bubble and only gained momentum with the fall of Lehman Brothers, and ensuing financial dislocation, the Global Economic Restructuring, from which the economy has yet to recover. Clinging to their outdated surmises, theories, and premises, the old guard is insistent on defending their numbers ad absurdia. Yes, the number of jobs has approached pre-great recession levels, however, they fail to admit that two part-time jobs do not equate two pre-great recession (or even one) pre-recession full-time jobs.
Now that the pundits have missed the ongoing electoral tsunami in 2016, for much the same reasons they missed the political rage, and anger boiling beneath the surface that has resulted in the ‘Outsider, phenomenon’.
Now, reading the accounts of the various experts, pundits and luminaries on how they ‘missed’ the Outsider phenomenon, is a study in how an isolated group of highly educated, intelligent, yet like-minded individuals, can create a sort of bubble that contains the only the things they expect to see and only those words they expect to hear. All else is cast as non-logical, ignorant, inconsistent, and most certainly not worthy of consideration. In this regard the last ten years read almost like a Harvard B-School Case Study.
The premise of our research is that economists and politicians were and unfortunately continue to use are missing the essence of the profound worldwide economic transformation that has been underway for quite some time. Unfortunately, this economic restructuring will continue unabated far into the future, unless and until the new economic reality is no longer constrained by this profoundly limited vision.
To date the facts have borne out our original assumptions:
The economy is not behaving as expected because were, are using outdated tools that need to be rethought.
Since we are using outdated tools and tracking systems,we continue to measure the economy as if it were the Reagan or Clinton years.
The recovery did not mirror previous recoveries in the US, and the traditional manufacturing sector continues to erode.
The Global Economic Restructuring has continued unabated.
China continues its seemingly inexorable rise; The US and the West continue to struggle.
The Lost Decade of Japan has indeed being replicated to varying degrees in the West.
And so it goes into the race for the 2016 Presidential Elections.
Since 2003, the Global Language Monitor has been tracking political trends through Big-Data English language analysis. We do not track pre-determined words, concepts, or names, rather we analyze the LinguaSphere to understand the ongoing global conversation. In this way, all personal, predetermined viewpoints and preconceptions are eliminated, or at least held to a minimum.
In this way, GLM specializes in finding what is not readily apparent or is trending only beneath the surface.
While the world celebrated the oncoming Hope and Change transformation, as did we, GLM also measured the massive undercurrents swirling beneath the surface. We then compared them to the 90 days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 90 days after the launch of Shock and Awe campaign presaging the invasion of Iraq. The results were certainly counter-intuitive, if not shocking:
It is this undercurrent that GLM has been tracking since then that lead directly to the current election cycle.
Every year since then, the underlying conditions for the Middle have deteriorated, while the political pundits obscure reality in order to increase their political fortunes while those of the Middle Class have fallen asunder.
“There is a feeling that the outrage is unprecedented, and the numbers certainly demonstrate the fact. The amount of anger and outrage as ignored by the media is, indeed, unprecedented,” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor.
To be continued…
In the meantime, if you would like an interview or any additional information, please call 001.512.801.6823 or reach out to us through email at info@LanguageMonitor.com.
To be continued…
In the meantime, if you would like an interview or any additional information, please call 001.512.801.6823 or reach out to us through email at info@LanguageMonitor.com.
Austin, Texas February 1, 2016 The 2016 major-party election candidates provide perhaps as broad a set of individuals as ever assembled for the Quadrennial White House scramble: a brash New Your billionaire, with perhaps another waiting on the sideline, a former first Lady (and senator & Secretary of State), a former high tech CEO, a soft-spoken neurosurgeon, a number of Evangelicals, a pastor, former governors, a hopeful member of a political dynasty, and a handful of minority candidates, among others.
It is a historical truism that a young, tanned, and relaxed John F. Kennedy won his 1960 televised debate with a sickly, sweaty Richard M. Nixon because JFK wore blue shirt and the just released from the hospital, Nixon grew a five o’clock shadow. A follow-up study found that Nixon won the debate among those who listened to the debate on radio, while Kennedy was declared the winner with those who viewed the debate on television.
Kennedy Proved the Victor Over Nixon — on Style Points
Fifty-six years later, in an age where image is key (namely The Optic) thanks to the likes of ubiquitous cell phones (read: cameras), combined with applications with hundred of millions of users (like Facebook, Twitter and Vine), an analysis of each candidate’s sartorial choices is a worthy area of investigation.
So far, we’ve seen Mr. Rubio’s high(er) heals from the mall, Hillary’s expanded palette for her designer pantsuits, Mr. Trump’s loud, outrageous, sometime obnoxious ties, Sanders in his glorious dishevelment, Carly as the avenging CEO warrior from Silicon Valley, Hillary in her ever-the-same, ever changing pantsuits, and the like, and to think that it all officially officially begins today….
Two of the Top Republican Contenders
The Global Language Monitor, annually presents a study of the Top Global Fashion Capitals; in the same manner GLM recently conducted a study of the Major US Presidential Candidates and subjected them to a slightly modified criteria of that which it has used in its Top Global Fashion Capitals ranking.
For our purposes, the candidates sartorial styles were divided into several categories, plus an overall winner that will surprise few. The country is again entering another period of transition. The fact remains that Mr. Obama is leaving office with the same approval rating as his predecessor, GW Bush (hovering around 48%). Again, there is tremendous uncertainty in the land, on all sides of the political spectrum. And once again, the voting public appears to be fascinated with their shiny, new toy(s): Trump, Sanders, Carson, Rubio, Fiorina, Cruz, etc.
For this analysis, the Global Language Monitor used its proprietary Brand Affiliation Index (BAI), the same technology used to measure global brand equity for the Olympics, World Cup, the Fortune 500, and others. This exclusive, GLM study is a Big Data textual analysis based on billions of webpages, millions of blogs, the top 375,000 global print and electronic media, and new social media formats as they appear.
This is GLM’s first study of Fashion in Politics, though it has been tracking differing issues in politics for about a decade and here and even into the future, here.
The results of the study will be published on February 1, 2016 …here is a Top Level Overview, which will be deconstucted below.
Total Score for Presidential Candidates: This chart will be deconstructrd later on Februry 1.
This Total Scores for Presidential Candidates, of both major parties. This chart provides a top- overview of all seventeen candidates for both the Democratic and Republican parties. Also included are potential candidates who might later enter the fray, such as Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden.
The Candidates that are being tracked follow:
Bernie Sanders
Carly Fiorina
Chris Christie
Donald Trump
Elizabeth Warren
Hillary Clinton
Jeb Bush
Jim Gilmore
Joe Biden
John Kasich
Marco Rubio
Martin
Michael Bloomberg
Mike Huckabee
Rand Paul
Rick SantorumTed Cruz
Of course, some half dozen of these candidates will be out of the race in the next several days.
You can find a Brief Sartorial Overview of US Presidents here.
Overall Candidate Fashion Ranking
Overall, Donald Trump outdistances the field, which could be expected for the Trump PR Machine. However, doubling the score of the second grouping of Cruz, Clinton, Christie, Bush and Biden, suggests that he’s gaining a significant number of style points.
The bottom four candodates would normally rate an asterisk (*) but the actual scores, themselves tell their own
This is a very interesting chart with Chris Christie topping the chart, closely followed by Cruz and Trump.
Clinton and Sanders are equally matched which is interesting because Sander’s overall demeanor is that of a wide-eyed, democratic socialist frpm a very small (read: inconsequential) state. Come to think of it that WAS his demeaner for most of his decades-long career.
Interesting to note is Marco Rubio;s middling finish.
Off-the-Rack Ranking
In haute couture, OTR connotes designer styled clothing that are not tailored to the individual.
In American presidential politics, it can mean Bloomingdale, Nordstrom, and Saks, or OMG! Target. Not always a positive connotation.
Pret-a-Porter Ranking
Chris Christie leads Pret-a-Porter. That’s right the Jersey Shore icon actually leads the category but by an incredibly small magin.
Overall Score
Finally, the Overall Score, a composite of all of the the above.
Austin, Texas, Olympic Weekend August 19-21, 2016 — The first Brand Scorecard of the Rio Olympics is in the can, and as usual Michael Phelps, is raking in an unprecedented amount of gold, as are the top Ambush Marketers of the 2016 Summer Games. This according to the Rio 2016 Olympics Brand Scorecard, the on-going longitudinal study by the Global Language Monitor, now tracking its sixth Olympiad. The study tracks the value leaks occurring when the Ambush Marketers siphon off some of the brand equity that by rights belong to the TOP Sponsors who pay hundreds of millions of dollars to secure these rights. GLM believes that fully loaded, TOP Sponsors spend up to a billion dollars per Olympiad to support their sponsorships.
Rio Olympics BAI Scores for Week 1 & 2
According to Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, “Beneath the glitter and the gold of the Games themselves, the Rio Olympics are plagued by a grim undercurrent of poverty, political malaise, and a failing infrastructure. In the same manner, directly beneath the glamorous, high impact Olympic-themed ad campaigns of the TOP Sponsors, lurk the stealth (and sometimes not so stealth) campaigns of the Ambushers.”
The Global Language Monitor’s Brand Affiliation Index (BAI) tracks the closeness of the relationship between branded entities in this case, the Rio Summer Olympics and its TOP Sponsors. Eighteen months ago the average BAI between and among the Rio Olympics and its TOP Sponsors registered higher than that of the London Summer Games. After the deluge of bad news engulfed the on-coming Games, the BAI tumbled to about half the London levels until beginning to rise, once again, about three months ago.
Rio BAI Change by Percent
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TOP Sponsors for RIO
The TOP Sponsors of the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics are: Atos Origin (EPA: ATO), Bridgestone (TYO: 5108), Coca-cola (NYSE: KO), Dow (NYSE: DOW.WD), GE (NYSE: GE), McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD), Omega SA (Private), Panasonic (TYO: 6752), P&G (NYSE: PG), Samsung (KRX: 005930), and Visa Card (NYSE: V).
Top Non-affiliated Marketers
The top Non-affiliated Marketers (NAM) or Ambush Marketers of the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics are: DuPont (NYSE: DD), IBM Global Services (NYSE: IBM), Michelin (EPA: ML), Nike (NYSE: NKE), Pepsi (NYSE: PEP), Philips (NYSE: PHG), Red Bull GmbH (Private), Rolex (Private), Siemens (AG ETR: SIE), Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX), Subway (Private), Under Armour and Unilever (NYSE: UL)
The 2016 Rio Summer Olympics Brand Scorecard.– GLM’s analysis is part of GLM’s on-going longitudinal study stretching back to the Summer Games in Beijing (2008) and forward to the Winter Games in Beijing in 2022. The study uses GLM’s Brand Affiliation Index (BAI) to track how often brand names are linked to the Olympics in global print and electronic media and social networks. GLM also uses the Entity Affiliation Index (EAI), to track non-branded entities in the same manner. The Zika virus is such a non-branded entity.
For the Rio Summer Games 2016 there are eleven Official Top Sponsors:
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has strict regulations in place to protect its official international partners and prevent ambushing official Olympic partners and sponsors, such as Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter which prohibits athletes working with non-affiliated marketers during the Games, though there are reports that the rule is being modified for RIO.
Methodology. Austin-Texas-based Global Language Monitor analyzes and catalogues the latest trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on the various aspects of culture, with a particular emphasis upon Global English. This exclusive ranking is based upon GLM’s Narrative Tracking technology. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 350,000 print and electronic news media, as well as new social media sources (such as Twitter) as they emerge. The words, phrases and concepts are tracked in relation to their frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets.
First Independent Measurement of the Impact of the Zika Virus on the Rio Games
Impact on the Games Themselves Growing Steadily
Significant Impact on Sponsors Varies by Sponsor
March 22, 2016 Austin, Texas — In the first independant analysis of the impact of the Zika Virus on the Rio Summer Games, the Global Language Monitor (GLM) has found two significant trends:
There is a significant and growing impact on the Games themselves, and
There is a greater impact on individual sponsors.
This analysis is part of GLM’s longitudinal study stretching back to the Summer Games in Beijing (2008) and forward to the Winter Games in Beijing in 2022. The ongoing study uses GLM’s Brand Affiliation Index (BAI) to track how often brand names were linked to the Olympics in global print and electronic media and social networks.
When tracking non-branded entities, such as the Zika Virus, GLM uses a slightly modified variation of the BAI called the Entity Tracking Index (EAI).
GLM Will Track Your Brand Up To and After the Closing Ceremonies, email INFO@lANGUAGEMONITOR.COM or Call +1.512.815.8836.
The graphic below shows the increasing Zika Virus’ Entity Tracking Index (EAI) numbers over the last six weeks.
Below is a different view of the Zika Virus’ Entity Tracking Index (EAI) numbers over the last six weeks.
“Of particular interest is the wide variation found in the EAIs between Major Sponsors.
“When tracking brand equity, the early numbers provide strong indicators of actual performance during the Games, providing a snapshop of the intense battle already being waged between the Official Olympic Sponsors and the Non-affiliated Marketers, also called Ambush Marketers or Ambushers,” said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief world Analyst of the Global Language Monitor.
“With the EAI, we are masking the sponsors’ numbers at this point, though these are available immediately by subscription to our service by the sponsor.”
Request the EAI analysis for your organization now: info@LanguageMonitor.com or call +1.512.815.8836 .
The customized report is available with individual details for your sponsorship; the report will be delivered to you within 24 hours of receipt of your order.
Zika Virus Impacts Individual Sponsors to Various Degrees
For the Rio Summer Games 2016 there are eleven Official Top Sponsors:
Coca-cola, Bridgestone, McDonald’s, P&G, GE, Omega, Samsung, Panasonic, Dow, Visa Card, and Atos Origin. Currently GLM is tracking some eleven Non-affiliated Marketers competing against the Top Sponsors, including: IBM Global Services, Siemens AG, Pepsi, Nike, DuPont, Starbucks, Red Bull, Rolex, Philips, Unilever, and Subway, among others.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has strict regulations in place to protect its official international partners and prevent ambushing official Olympic partners and sponsors, such as Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter which prohibits athletes working with non-affiliated marketers during the Games, though there are reports that the rule is being modified for RIO.
Methodology. Austin-Texas-based Global Language Monitor analyzes and catalogues the latest trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on the various aspects of culture, with a particular emphasis upon Global English. This exclusive ranking is based upon GLM’s Narrative Tracking technology. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 350,000 print and electronic news media, as well as new social media sources (such as Twitter) as they emerge. The words, phrases and concepts are tracked in relation to their frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets.
For more information call +1.512.801.6823 or email: Info@LanguageMonitor.com
New Brand Affiliation Index (BAI) Rankings for RIO 2016 Games
Bridgestone makes a remarkable debut as a Top Sponsor
Nike, though only an Official Supplier, has Clout of Top Sponsor
February 27, 2015 Austin, Texas — Top Olympic Sponsors Coca-Cola, Bridgestone, McDonald’s and GE lead the Marketing Race for the RIO Summer Games according to a new analysis of by the Global Language Monitor (GLM). Among Non-Affiliated Marketers (NAM), the leaders include IBM Global Services, Siemens, and Pepsi — with Starbucks and Red Bull firmly in the mix. Nike, though only an Official Supplier, scored squarely in the midst of the Top Partners. GLM used its proprietary Brand Affiliation Index (BAI) to determine these rankings in the “RIO Olympics 2016 Marketing Outlook,” now ready to order. Overall, nine of the top fifteen positions were held by Non-Top Partners, though three of the top five positions were held by Top Sponsors.
GLM Will Track Your Brand Up To and After the Closing Ceremonies, email INFO@lANGUAGEMONITOR.COM or Call +1.512.801.6823.
Among the surprises for the Top Sponsors were a remarkable debut by Bridgestone, currently besting all Top Sponsors save Coke, a strong showing for Nike, and disappointing showings for Samsung and Panasonic.
The report is an on-going longitudinal study stretching back to London and forward to Tokyo 2020. GLM’s BAI tracks how often brand names were linked to the Olympics in global print and electronic media and social networks.
“The importance of these early numbers cannot be underestimated, since they have been found to be strong indicators of actual performance during the Games, themselves,” said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief world Analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “In fact, the early numbers show an intense battle for position already being waged between the Official Olympic Sponsors and the Non-affiliated Marketers, also called Ambush Marketers or Ambushers.”
The ‘fully loaded’ cost of a Top Olympic partnership totals as much as $1 billion over the course of each four-year Olympiad.
For the Rio Summer Games 2016 there are eleven Official Top Sponsors: Coca-Cola, Bridgestone, McDonald’s, P&G, GE, Omega, Samsung, Panasonic, Dow, Visa Card, and Atos Origin. Currently GLM is tracking some eleven
Non-affiliated Marketers competing against the Top Sponsors: IBM Global Services, Siemens AG, Pepsi, Nike, DuPont, Starbucks, Red Bull, Rolex, Philips, Unilever, and Subway, among others. GLM tracks all three tiers of Olympic sponsorships and their non-affiliated competitors.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has strict regulations in place to protect its official international partners and prevent ambushing official Olympic partners and sponsors, such as Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter which prohibits athletes working with non-affiliated marketers during the Games, though there are reports that the rule is being modified for RIO.
Methodology. Austin-Texas-based Global Language Monitor analyzes and catalogues the latest trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on the various aspects of culture, with a particular emphasis upon Global English. This exclusive ranking is based upon GLM’s Narrative Tracking technology. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 250,000 print and electronic news media, as well as new social media sources (such as Twitter) as they emerge. The words, phrases and concepts are tracked in relation to their frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets. About the Global Language Monitor In 2003,
The Global Language Monitor (GLM) was founded in Silicon Valley by Paul J.J. Payack on the understanding that new technologies and techniques were necessary for truly understanding the world of Big Data, as it is now known. GLM provides a number of innovative products and services that utilize its ‘algorithmic services’ to help worldwide customers protect, defend and nurture their branded products and entities.
Products include ‘brand audits’ to assess the current status, establish baselines, and competitive benchmarks for current intellectual assets and brands. These services are currently provided to the Fortune 500, the Higher Education market, high technology firms, the worldwide print and electronic media, and the global fashion industry, among others. For more information, call 1.512.801.6823, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit LanguageMonitor.com.
The Back Story to The Re-Federalised United States (RFUS) in AD 2076
Attention: Embargoed until Tuesday, November 3, 2115. Call for exceptions. info@LanguageMonitor.com or 001 512 801-6823
Austin, Texas Federation, November 3, 2115 — As a public service GLM (Galactic Language Monitor, nee the Global Language Monitor) provides this overview on the birth of the Re-Federalised United States.
“The first fifteen years of the 20th c. set the trajectory for the remainder of the century — and beyond.” said Paul JJ Payack, president and Chief Word Analyst, the Global Language Monitor. “This included the seeds of World War, Bolshevism, Communism, German Nationalism, the carving up of the Middle East without regard to societal structures, total warfare, the introduction of weapons of mass destruction, flight, electrification of rural areas, the internal combustion engine, the dependence on hydrocarbon for fuel, Einstein’s first papers on relativity, the arms race, the explosive growth of cities, and so much more.
If the same can be said for the 21st century at the 15 year mark, what trends can we see that will be likely shape the rest of the 21st century, into the 22nd — and possibly beyond?
The ‘Re-Federalists’ convinced the majority of the US electorate to call a Constitutional Convention after decades of hat came to be called ‘the Great Gridlock’.
In the aftermath, the US was ‘re-federalised’ into fourteen ‘Federations,’ the former District was made into a politics-free ‘National Monument’. And the federal government moved into the range of Thomas Jefferson’s early estimates (extrapolated from thirty or forty into some 300,000 employees), who were equally divided among the Fourteen Federations.
The new federations were more politically, culturally and economically united, so the so-called “culture wars” of the 21st C. quickly faded away.
Another interesting note: VanCity and British Columbia, and ScotsLand, of the former United Kingdom were both annexed by the RFUS, without apparent opposition.
This also lit the economic engines of most of the new states, the the US Federation jumped into a sizable lead economically over China, again. However, China re-captured its lead as the world’s top economy later in the 21st c. and into the 22nd.
About the Galactic Language Monitor
Early in the last century, The Global Language Monitor (GLM) was founded in Silicon Valley by Paul J.J. Payack on the understanding that new technologies and techniques were necessary for truly understanding the world of Big Data, as it is now known. Silicon Valley is located in what is now the CaliMinor Federation.
For more information, call 1.512/.801.6823, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit www.LanguageMonitor.com.
In commemoration of the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall on the city of New Orleans and environs, we are republishing our original report about the impact of the disaster on the English Language.
Media Abounds With Apocalyptic-type References in Coverage of Katrina
Disaster, Biblical, Global Warming, Hiroshima Top List
‘Refugee’ vs. ‘Evacuee’
San Diego, Calif. September 7, 2005. In an exclusive analysis by The Global Language Monitor, the worldwide media was found to abound in Apocalyptic-type terminology in its coverage of the unfolding disaster of Hurricane Katrina in the American Gulf States. Using its proprietary PQI (Predictive Quantities Indicator) algorithm, GLM found the ominous references to include: Disaster, Biblical, Global Warming, Hiroshima/Nuclear bomb, Catastrophe, Holocaust, Apocalypse, and End-of-the-World.
“These alarmist references are coming across the spectrum of print and electronic media, and the internet,” said Paul JJ Payack, president of GLM. “The world appears stunned that the only remaining super power has apparently been humbled, on its own soil, by the forces of nature.”
The global media are mesmerized by the constant bombardment of television images of apparently rampaging, out-of-control elements, apparently in control of a good part of New Orleans, as well as the inability of the authorities to keep their own people fed, sheltered, evacuated, and, even, from dying on the street.
‘Refugee vs. ‘Evacuee’
GLM’s analysis found, for example, that the term for the displaced, refugees, that is usually associated with places like the Sudan and Afghanistan, appeared 5 times more frequently in the global media than the more neutral ‘evacuees,’ which was cited as racially motivated by some of the Black leadership. Accordingly, most of the major media outlets in the U.S. eliminated the usage of the word ‘refugees’ with a few exceptions, most notably, the New York Times.
The September 3 edition of The Times (London) has a story to illustrate the current state of affairs. The head: “Devastation that could send an area the size of England back to the Stone Age.”
The first 100 words sum up the pervasive mood found in the GLMs analysis of the Global Media.
“AMERICA comes to an end in Montgomery, Alabama.For the next 265 miles to the Gulf Coast, it has been replaced by a dangerous and paranoid post-apocalyptic landscape, short of all the things fuel, phones, water and electricity needed to keep the 21st century switched on. By the time you reach Waveland, Mississippi, the coastal town of 6,800 where corpses lie amid a scene of Biblical devastation, any semblance of modern society has gone. “
According to GLM’s analysis, the most frequently used terms associated with Hurricane Katrina in the global media with examples follow. The terms are listed in order of relative frequency.
Disaster — The most common, and perhaps neutral, description. Literally ‘against the stars’ in Latin. Example: ” Disaster bares divisions of race and class across the Gulf states”. Toronto Globe and Mail.
Biblical — Used as an adjective. Referring to the scenes of death, destruction and mayhem chronicled in the Bible. ” …a town of 6,800 where corpses lie amid a scene of Biblical devastation”. (The Times, London)
Global Warming — The idea that the hand of man was directly responsible for the catastrophe, as opposed to the more neutral climate change. “…German Environmental Minister Jrgen Trittin remains stolid in his assertion that Hurricane Katrina is linked to global warming and America’s refusal to reduce emissions.” (Der Spiegel)
Hiroshima/Nuclear Destruction — Fresh in the mind of the media, following the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. “Struggling with what he calls Hurricane Katrina’s nuclear destruction, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour shows the emotional strain of leading a state through a disaster of biblical proportions”. (Associated Press).
Catastrophe — Sudden, often disastrous overturning, ruin, or undoing of a system. “In the Face of Catastrophe, Sites Offer Helping Hands”. (Washington Post)
Holocaust — Because of historical association, the word is seldom used to refer to death brought about by natural causes. ” December’s Asian catastrophe should have elevated “tsunami” practically to the level of “holocaust” in the world vocabulary, implying a loss of life beyond compare and as callous as this might make us seem, Katrina was many things, but “our tsunami” she wasn’t. (Henderson [NC] Dispatch)
Apocalypse — Referring to the prophetic visions of the imminent destruction of the world, as found in the Book of Revelations. ” Call it apocalyptic. Whatever you want to call it, take your pick. There were bodies floating past my front door. ” said Robert Lewis, who was rescued as floodwaters invaded his home. (Reuters)
End of the World — End-time scenarios which presage the Apocalypse. ” “This is like time has stopped Its like the end of the world.” (Columbus Dispatch)
Then there are those in the media linking Katrina with the direct intervention of the hand of an angry or vengeful God, though not necessarily aligned with Americas enemies. “The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah, But Not an Adherent of Al-Qaeda,” was written by a high-ranking Kuwaiti official, Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment’s research center. It was published in Al-Siyassa. (Kuwait).
Note: Hurricane Alpha has now been named marking the busiest Atlantic Hurricane season on record … therefore the tropical ‘events’ were named beta, then gamma, delta … and it seemed they would go on through the Greek Alphabet. Here’s the entire Greek Alphabet:
The Eighth Annual Analysis by the Global Language Monitor
NEW YORK, March 4, 2015 – Milan is the Top Fashion Buzzword for 2015 followed by, Suede, Booty, Kate’s Baby Girl, and Yellow Hues. Rounding out the Top Ten were Blue & White; Plus Size, Gingham, Shirt Dresses, and Trans Models. Wrapping up this year’s list are Denim, Flourishes, Corduroy, Retro Fashion, and Transparents.
Milan has been working hard to re-establish itself as the pre-eminent capital of Global Fashion, or at least to being consistently named as one of the Big Four. Milan last held the Top Spot in Global Language Monitor’s annual ranking in 2008. Much of the internet mediabuzz, not all of it positive, revolves upon these efforts to revive its ‘brand’. [Update: The recent reports from Milan were not favorable.]
“In a time besodden with violence and horrors perpetrated against women and girls, the world of fashion stands out as a beacon of self-affirming light to celebrate the inherent beauty and dignity of every woman, and her ability transform herself in whatever way she sees fit,” said Rebecca Roman, Manhattan-based Fashion Director for GLM.
Each year, the Global Language Monitor ranks the Top Global Fashion Capitals. in the latest ranking, New York topped Paris and London followed by Los Angeles, Barcelona, Rome, Berlin, Sydney, Antwerp, and Shanghai. The Top Global Fashion for 2015 will be announced prior to Spring Fashion Weeks in the Fall. For the current list of the Top 50 Fashion Capitals Go here
The Top Fashion Buzzwords of 2015 follow:
Rank, Buzzword, Comment
Milan — Lots of buzz and not all good as it tries to claw its way back to the top.
Suede — Fifty shades of Suede.
Booty — Last year it was underbutt, this year just butt (S/O To Kim K.).
Kate’s Baby girl — A little princess waiting in the wings?
Yellow Hues — Dozens of yellow hues from which to choose: Lemon yellow, marigold, primrose, saffron, vermillion, canary, ….
Blue & White — Edging in on the Black & White.
Plus Size — Models ahead of the curve(s).
Gingham –Not talking about Little House on the Prairie here .
Shirt Dresses — Even sweater dresses..
Trans Models — Transgender Models now making an impact on the Red Carpet.
Denim — This time as dresses.
Flourishes — Fringe, Feathers and Tassels.
Corduroy — Moving well beyond the halls of academe.
Retro Fashion — Hmmm, this year retro moves on to the ’70s.
Transparents — Sheers, and Peek-a-Boos.
Methodology: GLM’s various word analyses are longitudinal in nature covering a number of years that varies with the particular analysis. The rankings are based upon actual word usage throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.83 billion people. GLM analyses billions of web pages, millions of blogs, 300,000 print and electronic news organizations, and new social media sites as they emerge. To qualify for GLM’s lists, the words, names, and phrases must be found globally, have a minimum of 25,000 citations. and the requisite ‘depth’ and ‘breadth’ of usage. Depth is here defined as appearing in various forms of media; breadth that they must appear world-over, not limited to a particular profession or social group or geography.
Top Fashion Buzzwords of previous years include:
All Things New York (2014)
London (2013)
the Princess Effect (2012)
Kate Middleton (2011)
Lady Gaga (2010), and
Chiconomics (2009)
About the Global Language Monitor
In 2003, The Global Language Monitor (GLM) was founded in Silicon Valley by Paul J.J. Payack on the understanding that new technologies and techniques were necessary for truly understanding the world of Big Data, as it is now known.
Today, from its home in Austin, Texas Global Language Monitor analyzes and catalogues the latest trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on the various aspects of culture, with a particular emphasis upon Global English.
The Difference between New York and Paris was 0.05% And No. 4? Los Angeles! Yes, LA.
February Fashion Weeks, 2014 New York and Austin, Texas — New York was reclaimed the title of the Top Global Fashion Capital from London, which had held the tile for 2011 and 2012. Paris, which also won the title of the Top Global Fashion Capital for Haute Couture, finished in the No. 2 spot overall. New York and Paris were separated by 0.05%, the closest in the 10-year history of the Global Language Monitor’s survey. In another development, Los Angeles moved into the esteemed Big Four status, moving up five spots from 2012.
Coming Later in 2014: The Global Fashion Capital Institute
Midtown Manhattan
. The rest of the Top Ten included: Barcelona, Rome, Berlin, Sydney, Antwerp, and Shanghai. Berlin solidified its position, while Antwerp completed it steady climb, Sydney had a triumphal return, and Shanghai returns to what many consider its rightful place in the Top Ten. Asia was well represented with Tokyo (11), Singapore (19), and Hong Kong (20) in the Top Twenty. “New York City has, indeed, earned its Top Global Fashion Capital ranking through its disciplined, methodical yet creative approach to its fashion industry.” said Bekka Payack, New York-based Fashion Director for The Global Language Monitor.
“Paris, with the Top Haute Couture ranking, of course has a centuries-long heritage, having invented the very concept, also scored highly in the pret-a-porter category. This year’s rankings also demonstrate the creative energy that is emerging worldwide in terms of fashion as a jobs, income and wealth generator, not to mention the prestige associated with exporting your fashion sense to the world.”
. The Top Global Fashion Capital Rankings are listed below, in the format: Position, City, Change from 2012, and comment.
New York (+1) — The Big Apple is back on top of the fashion world by slipping past Paris by .5%.
Paris (+2) — The Top Global Fashion Capital for Haute Couture is surprisingly strong in pret-a-porter, also.
London (-2) — London has enjoyed a fabulous two-year run and is now secure in its place in the top echelon for global fashion.
Los Angeles (+5) — Zut alors! Tinsel Town in the Top Four? The result of the melding of the Red Carpet, the Industry (film, of course), and West Coast cool.
Barcelona (-2) — Espana, again, places two Fashion Capitals in the Top Fifteen. Barcelona also wins the Top Fashion Capital for Swimwear.
Rome (0) — Rome may have Seven Hills but Italy now has Three Fashion Capitals (and Milan is No. 2).
Berlin (+3) — Berlin continues its steady rise moving deeper into the the elite ranks.
Sydney (+7) — Sydney towers over OZ distancing (and distinguishing) itself, once again, from Melbourne.
Antwerp (+2) — Ah Antwerp, reverberations of the avant garde Antwerp Six continues into the 21st century.
Shanghai (+12) — As China further emerges onto the world stage, Shanghai leads the fashion charge.
Tokyo (+9) — Tokyo made a leap in 2013 that many consider long overdue.
Milano (-4) — Milan was the Top Global Fashion Capital back in 2009 and remains a strong contender for the top spot year-after-year.
Florence (+3) — Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli — A proud heritage to a thriving fashion industry in 2013.
Madrid (-9) — Still strong in 2013, further cementing its place among the elite Fashion Capitals.
Sao Paulo (-8) — Again, the Queen of Latin American Fashion Capitals.
St. Petersburg (+35) — Russian comes into 2014 with two Fashion Capitals in the Top Twenty, with Petrograd surprising Moscow.
Moscow (+18) — Apparently a rising tide does, indeed, raise all ships as Moscow comes back strong from 2012.
Singapore (+1) — Basically standing in place (and a good place to stand) but now trailing both Shanghai and Tokyo.
Miami (+20) — Miami is, indeed, more than swimwear; and the fashion world apparently recognizes it
Hong Kong (-8) — Down another eight spots this year but still a strong global presence.
Prague (+24) — Prague continues its well-deserved ascension up the Fashion Capital ladder.
New Delhi (+26) — A major move for Delhi, the result of ‘sticking to the knitting’ (its traditional strengths) and focusing on them.
Krakow (+10) — Krakow continues it curious and continuous expansion of influence.
Warsaw (+19) — Warsaw, too, is finding its stride as a major regional player.
Dallas (+21) — The Big D is now the top US regional Fashion Capital.
Melbourne (-5) — Still solid but falling further behind Sydney in the race for the OZ title.
Cape Town (+27) — In a major surprise, Cape Town leaps over Jo-burg or, rather, Jo-burg falls behind the Mother City.
Rio de Janeiro (-11) — Rio, which has the upcoming World Cup and Summer Olympics in 2016, needs to keep pace with Sao Paulo.
Chicago (+21) — The City of Big Shoulders continues to reach out as a global fashion contender.
Buenos Aires (-17) — Buenos Aires’s native-born son, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has won a major fashion award, as the city itself flourishes as a regional Fashion Capital
Dubai (-3) — A burgeoning global presence and the No. 1 Fashion Capital in the Middle East.
Toronto (+21) — Makes a major move to take the lead in Canada, over Toronto (by one) and Montreal (by 15).
Vancouver (-2) — VanCity is developing its own, distinctive fashion sense, finding admirers the world over.
Las Vegas (-10) — Las Vegas is attempting to build a brand-new fashion infrastructure.
Amsterdam (-8) — Creative impulses continue to flow outward from the Netherlands.
Stockholm (-4) — Stockholm is now the Nordic Fashion Capital, with good reason.
Johannesburg (-19) — Jo-burg, continues in its role as a major regional center influencer.
ienna (-1) — The ancient imperial citadel continues to exert its classic fashion sense.
Bali (-25) — Bali is a serious Fashion Capital for Swimwear, a strong annual contender.
Boston ( 4) — Boston brings a classic sense of traditional American design with flashes of innovation.
Mexico City (+6) — Finding its footing as a major Latin American Fashion Capital
Houston (+7) — One of the three Texas cities to emerge in recent years.
Copenhagen (-13) — Copenhagen and Stockholm continue to contend for leadership in the Nordic World.
Monaco (-19) — Monte Carlo is, well, Monte Carlo.
Mumbai (-7) — Over the last few years Delhi has surpassed Mumbai as the Fashion Capital of the Subcontinent.
Atlanta (+9) — Atlanta, is now the Fashion Capital, as well as the Capital of the New South.
Santiago (-21) — A solid, yet idiosyncratic, fashion presence in the sphere of Latin American Fashion.
Montreal (+4) — An Old World presence in a thriving New World metropolis.
Caracas (-26) — Working hard to maintain its traditional yet advanced fashion sensibilities.
San Francisco (-9) — Continues to thrive as one of the two centers of outre (and odd) fashion in the US.
Abu Dhabi (-11) — There are more vibrant outposts of fashion that are contending to replace Abu Dhabi on this list.
Bangkok (-23) — Bangkok’s fashion reputation reflected the decline of civil order in Thailand
Austin (-11) — The other thriving center of outre (and odd) fashion in the US.
Seoul (-21) — The emerging Fashion Capital continues to build on its distinctive sense of Asian style.
The Watch List for 2014 includes: Auckland, Beirut, Jakarta, Kuala Lampur, Tel Aviv, and a number of cities in Africa.Top Fashion Capitals by Region Europe: Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona, Berlin, Antwerp, Milano, Florence, Madrid, Monaco, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Frankfurt.India: New Delhi, MumbaiAustralia: Sydney, MelbourneAsia: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Singapore, Bali
RSA: Cape Town, Johannesburg
Middle Europe: St Petersburg, Moscow, Prague, Vienna, Krakow, Warsaw
Canada: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal
Mideast: Dubai, Abu Dhabi
Iberia: Barcelona, Madrid
Latin America: Sao Paulo, Rio de Janerio, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Santiago, Caracas
Regional US: New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Las Vegas, Boston, Houston, Atlanta, San Francisco, Austin
About the Global Language Monitor This exclusive ranking is based upon GLM’s Narrative Tracking technology. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 250,000 print and electronic news media, as well as new social media sources (such as Twitter) as they emerge.
The words, phrases and concepts are tracked in relation to their frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets.
Pope Francis Topped by Ebola for Top Name of 2014 (see below)
“Hands Up, No Shoot” is the Top Phrase of the Year of 2014 (see below)
Documenting the year 2014 through English-language word usage
Global Language Monitor’s 15th Annual Survey of Global English
AUSTIN, Texas, December 2014 — The Emoji ideograph for Heart (and Love) is the Top Word for 2014 according to the 15th Annual survey of the English language by the the Global Language Monitor. The Heart and Love emoji, emoticon, and variations thereof appear billions of times a day around the world — across languages and cultures. This is the first time an ideograph has captured Word of the Year honors.
The GLM Word, Phrase, and Names of the Year lists are intended to provide a history of each year since 2000 through English-language word usage.
” Each emoji represents an emotion, expression, or state of mind, or a person, place or thing, so much so, that we see the birth of the AlphaBorg or AlphaBit.” said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor.
“The English Language is now undergoing a remarkable transformation unlike any in its 1400 year history — its system of writing, the Alphabet, is gaining characters at amazing rate. These character are ideographs or pictographs that are called emoji and emoticons. There are about a thousand emoji characters now officially recognized by Unicode Consortium, the official keepers of coding that forms the basis of the Internet. They regularly review new suggestions with the next 37 or so being finalized for June 2015. Then the new emoji can be embedded in any number of devices for any number of languages.
“The AlphaBIT now includes letters, numbers, the diacritical marks that compose emoticons, as well as clever electronic solutions that provide real-time access to more than hundreds of emoji.”
GLM’s top words, phrases and names this year represent some five continents, which continues to confirm the ever-expanding nature of the English language.
Example of Emoji Keyboard
The figure below shows an Emoji keyboard for Apple. When you select the Emoji keyboard, you will see a new key on the bottom row, which looks like an stylized globe.
You click this key to access a number of emoji ideographic menus for differing classes of emoji. In this way the key doesn’t present a single letter, number, or diacritical mark but rather access to hundreds or thousands of emoji.
The following figures show the Top 7 Emojis on a specialized Twitter feed for 24 hours back in June 2014. Fourteen of the Top 100 were heart-based.
At last count there are now some 722 characters, with another 250 being made available during the next year, and 37 more due for approval in June 2015.
The Top Words of 2014 follow.
Rank / Word / Comments
The Heart ♥ Emoji (for love) — The Heart ♥ Emoji (for love) is the Top Word of 2014. Each emoji represents an emotion, expression, or state of mind, or a person, place or thing.
Hashtag — The re-invented pound-sign becomes evermore powerful.
Vape — Smoking an electronic or e-cigarette, shorthand for vaporize, or vaping. Vapers are banned from indoor vaping in New York and other locales.
Blood Moon — Four total eclipses of the moon in eighteen-month span. Some Christians see it as the presaging a “lunar apocalypse”.
Nano — From Greek for dwarf, small; now 1 billionth of a meter, and any number of words surrounding nano technology.
Photo Bomb — Breaking into a ‘pre-arranged” photograph without authorization resulting in often humorous outcomes.
Caliphate — Literally, a land ruled by an Islamic Caliph typically governed under Sharia Law.
(White) privilege — The alleged advantages of having lighter colored skin in a diverse society.
Bae — Term of endearment for one’s object of desire.
“Bash” Tag — Using a hashtag to undermine your frenemies.
Transparency — That state of government openness that is apparently unachievable in the Western World.
Sustainable — The Jimmy Carter of words; keeps getting stronger since it was WOTY in 2006.
Clickbait — A link you just have to click on, though its more of a paid-for bait-and-switch.
Quindecennial — Fifteen year anniversary; 2014 is the quindecinnal of the 21st century.
Comet — Comet 67p has a visitor from the Rosetta Spacecraft.
OK is most understood word in the world, again. See more.
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The Top Phrases of 2014
Rank / Phrase / Comment
Hands Up, Don’t Shoot — Demonstrators’ continued chant after shooting of unarmed suspect in Ferguson, Missouri.
Cosmic Inflation — The explosive growth of the Universe from virtually nothing. OK, there was something nowadays called the Singularity, sized about a billionth of a billionth of an inch. More evidence emerges that the Big Bang is settled science.
Global Warming — The past is prologue here. 15,000 years ago New York City was buried under 5,000 meters of ice.
Climate Change – Add ‘anthropogenic’ warming to this fact: the existence of the Bering Land Bridge 20,000 years ago suggests that the Oceans were some 100 meters lower than today. (That’s about a football field.)
War on Women — In the Islamic state, women and young girls (10 and older) are stolen and then sold into sexual slavery or forced into involuntary marriages. And this after watching the beheading of their husbands, sons and brothers.
All Time High — Many see this all-too-prevalent description of many world markets as more of a warning that a cause for celebration.
Rogue nukes — Sources state that Iran can now assemble a bomb in two weeks. This is going from hypothetical to reality. (If true, International Inspection Effort: Fail.)
Near-Earth Asteroid — Admittedly more of a space rock than an asteroid but it did create significant property damage as well as injuries before crashing into a Russian lake.
Big Data — No 1 on the current High Tech Buzzword list, ushering in a global transformation in how data is processed, analyzed, and transformed into solutions.
Polar Vector — An unusually long-lived Polar Outbreak plunging deep in the Southern territories.
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The Top Names of 2014
Rank /Name / Comments
Ebola — The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is a highly contagious, often fatal, hemorrhagic disease. The current outbreak started in West Africa earlier this year and has claimed some 5,000 lives as of this writing.
Pope Francis — The most highly cited name, again. The former Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church, born December 17, 1936 in Buenos Aires.
World War One — A conflict from the early 20th century that many historians are beginning to understand as incomplete.
Médecins Sans Frontières — Doctors Without Borders, is a Nobel Peace Prize winning NGO founded in 1971. Heroically, involved in current Ebola epidemic.
MH370 — Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared on Saturday, 8 March 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 passengers and crew.
FIFA World Cup — Better known simply as the World Cup, in 2014 won by Germany over Argentina (and heavily favored Brasil).
Ice Bucket Challenge — A popular charity-based fund-raising activity to generate funds for ALS. The stunt involves pouring buckets of water and ice over the heads of the participants.
Crimea — Reminder to Mr. Putin and the history-conscious (and poetically inclined): The Charge of the Light Brigade did not end well.
The Mid-terms — The US national election held during non-Presidential election years, hence the name, Mid-term.
NSA — The National Security Agency of the US collects intelligence through clandestine means of both foreign and (to the surprise of many) domestic sources.
Prince George of Cambridge. 5a. HRH Georgie — Nickname of Prince George of Cambridge, son of ‘Wills and Kate.” Watch this space as a ‘sister?’ enters the family.
Malala Yousafzai — Two years ago named co-name of the Year by GLM, this year the co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.The Pakistani girl shot by terrorists for promoting the right to education for girls.
Xi Jinping — “Steady as she goes,” as his term proceeds as China’s paramount leader.
President Obama – ‘Hope and Change’ retreats even further into history as Obama’s second term troubles mount.
Sochi Olympics — The XXII Olympic Winter Games that took place 7 to 23 February 2014, in Sochi, Russia.
Methodology: GLM’s Word of the Year rankings are based upon actual word usage throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.83 billion people. To qualify for these lists, the words, names, and phrases must meet three criteria: 1) found globally, 2) have a minimum of 25,000 citations, and 3) have the requisite ‘depth’ and ‘breadth’ of usage. Depth is here defined as appearing in various forms of media; breadth that they must appear world-over, not limited to a particular professional or social group or geography. The goal is to find the word usage that will endure the test of time.
GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis. NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 275,000 print and electronic global media (not limited to the English-language-based media), as well as new social media sources as they emerge.
The Top Words, Phrases, and Names since the Turn of the Century
2013:
Top Words: No. 1 ‘404’, No.2 Fail, No.3 Hashtag
Top Phrases: No. 1 Toxic Politics, No. 2 Federal Shutdown, No.3 Global Warming/Climate Change
Top Names: No. 1. Pope Francis, No. 2 ObamaCare, No.3 NSA
2012:
Top Words: No. 1 ApocalypseArmageddon, No.2 Deficit, No. 3 Olympiad
Top Phrases: No. 1 Gangnam Style, No. 2 Climate Change/Global Warming, No. 3 Fiscal Cliff
Top Names: No. 1 Newtown and Malala Yousafzai, No. 3 Xi Jinping
2011:
Top Words: No. 1 Occupy, No.2 Fracking, No.3 Drone
Top Phrases: No. 1 Arab Spring, No. 2 Royal Wedding, No.3 Anger and Rage
Top Names: No. 1 Steve Jobs, No. 2 Osama bin-laden and Seal Team Six, No.3 Fukushima
2010:
Top Words: No. 1 Occupy, No.2 Fracking, No.3 Drone
Top Phrases: No. 1 Anger and Rage, No. 2 Climate Change, No. 3 The Great Recession
Top Names: No. 1 Hu Jintao, paramount leader of China, No. 2 iPad, No. 3 Barack Obama
2009:
Top Words: No. 1 Twitter, No. 2 Obama-, No. 3 H1N1
Top Phrases: No. 1 King of Pop, No. 2 Obama-mania, No. 3 Climate Change
Top Names: No. 1 Obama, No. 2 Michael Jackson, No. 3 Mobama
2008:
Top Words: No. 1 Change, No. 2 Bailout, No. 3 Obama-mania
Top Phrases: No. 1 Financial Tsunami, No. 2 Global Warming, No. 3 “Yes, We Can!”
Top Names: No. 1 Barack Obama, No. 2 George W. Bush, No.3 Michael Phelps
2007:
Top Words: No. 1 Hybrid (representing all things green), No. 2: Surge
Top Phrase: Climate Change
Top Name: Al Gore
2006:
Top Word: Sustainable
Top Phrase: Stay the Course
Top Name: Dafur
2005:
Top Words: No. 1, Refugee No. 2: Tsunami No. 3: Katrina
Top Phrase: Outside the Mainstream
Top Name: (acts of ) God
2004:
Top Word: Incivility (for inCivil War)
Top Phrase: Red States/Blue States No. 2: Rush to War
Top Name: Dubya/Rove
2003:
Top Word: Embedded
Top Phrase: Shock and Awe, No. 2: Rush to War
Top Name: Saddam Hussein, No. 2 Dubya
2002:
Top Word: Misunderestimate
Top Phrase: Threat Fatigue
Top Name: W (Dubya)
2001:
Top Word: Ground Zero
Top Phrase: ‘Lets Roll’
Top Name: The Heros
2000:
Top Word: Chad
Top Phrase: Dot.com
Top Name: W (Dubya)
About the Global Language Monitor
Austin-Texas-based Global Language Monitor analyzes and catalogues the latest trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on the various aspects of culture. GLM analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 250,000 print and electronic news media, as well as new social media sources (such as Twitter) as they emerge. The words, phrases and concepts are tracked in relation to their frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets.
In 2003, The Global Language Monitor (GLM) was founded in Silicon Valley by Paul J.J. Payack on the understanding that new technologies and techniques were necessary for truly understanding the world of Big Data, as it is now known. GLM provides a number of innovative products and services that utilize its ‘algorithmic services’ to help worldwide customers protect, defend and nurture their branded products and entities.
Carleton Beats Williams and Pomona on College List
Austin, Texas, July 29, 2010 – The University of Michigan again edged out Harvard atop the Global Language Monitor’s TrendTopper Media Buzz list of the nation’s Top 300 Colleges and Universities. Notably UCLA and the University of Texas moved into the Top Ten for the first time. In the College category, Carleton College beat Williams and Pomona to notch the Top Spot for the first time. In the Fall 2009 edition, Wellesley came in No. 1.
“The TrendTopper MediaBuzz Rankings are a way of seeing the schools through the eyes of the world at large. It is a democratic, self-generating ratings system, since it captures the brand equity associated with each of these fine institutions,” said Paul JJ Payack, the president of Global Language Monitor. “GLM’s TrendTopper MediaBuzz Rankings actually removes all bias inherent in each of the other published rankings, since they actually reflect what is being said and stated on the billions of web pages that we measure.”
The Top 25 Universities by TrendTopper MediaBuzz include the following.
The Top Specialty schools listed in their categories as well as overall rank include:
Top Engineering Schools: MIT (6 overall, university), The Cooper Union (9 overall, college), Harvey Mudd (21 overall, college), California Institute of Technology (CalTech) (35 overall, university), and Carnegie Mellon University (42 overall, university).
Top Online/For Profit Schools: the University of Phoenix (63 overall, university), Kaplan University (124 overall, university) and Capella University (140 overall, university)Top Christian School: Wheaton College, IL (16 overall, college)
Top Military Academies: the United States Military Academy (11 overall, college), the United States Naval Academy (26 overall, college), and the United States Air Force Academy (31 overall, college), United States Coast Guard Academy (118 overall, college), and United States Merchant Marine Academy (119 overall, college).
Top Art and Design Schools: Pratt Institute (16 overall, college), Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) (51 overall, college), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (66 overall, college), California Institution of the Arts (70 overall, college), and Minneapolis College of Art and Design (92 overall, college).
Top Music Schools: the Julliard School (39 overall, college), Berklee College (87 overall, college), the Curtis Institute, (108 overall, college), the Cleveland Institute of Music (110 overall, college), and the New England Conservatory of Music (131 overall, college).
Top Business School: Babson College (37 overall, college).
The Global Language Monitor publishes the TrendTopper Media Buzz College and University Rankings. twice a year, with spring and fall editions. Many institutions of higher education, including Harvard, Boston College, and Vanderbilt have used the rankings as a validation of their recent reputation management decisions.
The complete report, including short term and long term change, rankings by state, and complete PQI index is available for $998. For more information, call 1.925.367.7557 or email pjjp@post.harvard.edu
Out-of-touch moves into No. 1 position over Deficit Spending; Oil Spill tops Health Care Reformer
Austin, Texas, July 24, 2010 – As the political calendar inexorably heads toward the Mid-term elections, the focus on President Obama’s competing ‘narratives’ continue to play out in the media.
Since his Oval Address on the Oil Spill, Obama’s personal narrative is being shaped by forces largely out of his control, such as the on-going Gulf drama. These are how the five most prevalent competing narratives compare, according to Austin-based Global Language Monitor (GLM). GLM has been monitoring the language of politics since 2003.
The ranking of the President’s five most prominent narrative arcs include:
Obama as out-of-touch or aloof – This is up 1200% since the beginning of the year; this is the converse of Hope and Change.
Obama and the deficit — Words linking Obama to deficit have increased some 2500% since the beginning of 2010.
Obama and the Oil Spill — A very fast mover now ahead of Obama as Health Care reformer. Could the completion of the relief well turn this around?
Obama as HealthCare Reformer — Losing steam quickly for the president’s signature achievement.
Obama as the Chicago-style pol — A continued, steady rise in linking Obama to old-style Chicago politics.
“At this point, all five narratives in play are problematic for the president,” said Paul JJ Payack, GLM’s president and chief word analyst. “With the Mid-terms some hundred days away, the president needs a series of (possibly unexpected) positive events to stem this tide.”
Obama Narrative 2.0, the underlying storyline that will largely define the president in the run-up to the Mid-term elections and, possibly, for time remaining in his term. The ‘narrative’ refers to the stream of public opinion captured by blogs and other social media outlets on the Internet, as well as the leading print and electronic databases.
The NarrativeTracker Index (NTI), the first product specifically designed to use social media-based monitoring to better understand the issues driving any particular topic. Because the NTI is based on the national discourse, it provides a real-time, accurate picture of what the public is saying about any topic, at any point in time. In addition to the NTI, the Narrative Tracker Arc™ follows the rise and fall of sub-stories within the main narrative to provide a comprehensive overview of the opinions surrounding a single issue.
NTI tracks the ‘narrative’ of a subject, as well as projecting future trajectories for the narrative. The result has several advantages over traditional polls: 1) Immediacy; 2) The lack of any bias that tends to creep into traditional polling, e.g., when individuals answer questions with what they think are the ‘correct’ answers rather than their true opinions; and 3) NTI lets policy and decision makers focus on the true issues driving perceptions and concerns rather than being driven by false and phantom concepts. In addition, the Narrative Tracker Arc™ follows the rise and fall of sub-stories within the main narrative.
NTI is more effective in capturing the true opinion of the public because it tracks unfiltered keywords in Social Media and other sources, rather than how that opinion is interpreted by the news media or by pollsters.
The NTI is based on the GLM’s Predictive Quantities Indicator™ (PQI™). The PQI tracks the frequency of words and phrases in global print and electronic media on the Internet, throughout the Blogosphere and other social media outlets as well as accessing proprietary databases. The PQI is a weighted index that factors in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum, and velocity.
Austin, TX July 12, 2010 – The World Cup 2010 was an historical affair in many regards, the a first for the African continent; a first for the South African people and, of course, a first for Spain.
Another perhaps unintended consequence of World Cup 2010 is the acceptance of the word, vuvuzela, into the English language lexicon according to the qualifying criteria established by Austin-based Global Language Monitor.
The vuvuzela are the seemingly ubiquitous brightly colored plastic horns, said to have the potential to inflict lasting hearing loss because of the loudness and pitch of a typical vuvuzela (B flat below middle C, according to the BBC).
“Vuvuzela appears certain to achieve a place (or at least some notoriety) within the ranks of the English language. Vuvuzela has already appeared some 2450 times in a recent search of the New York Times archive,” said Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor. “That is quick a few citations for the ‘first draft of history; even a quick Google search yield over 6,000,000 hits on the term.”
The thresholds to cross into the English Lexicon include 25,000 citations meeting criteria for breadth of geographic dispersion along within a depth of media formats including the Internet, blogosphere and social media along with various formats of print and electronic media. Since 2003, the Global Language Monitor has been recognizing new words or neologisms once they meet these criteria.
The word vuvuzela, itself of uncertain origin. Some think it is related to the summoning horn, the kudu, for African villages. Others speculate it to be derived from an onomatopoeic Zulu word for the sound ‘vu-vu’, or a word for noise making, while many believe it to be ‘township slang’ for shower (of noise).
English gets a new word – thanks to SA
Jul 18, 2010 12:00 AM | By Sashni Pather
The World Cup was historic in a few ways: a first for the African continent, South Africa’s people and for Spain.
DALLAS & AUSTIN, Texas, July 7, 2010 — The Healthcare NarrativeTracker™ has detected a growing wave of concern throughout the nation about containing rising Healthcare costs. The catalyst stems from the new regulations being now written to implement The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. At this point the affordability issue is coalescing around the President Obama’s oft-stated pledge that you can keep current Health Insurance plans if you so choose. As M.I.T. health economist Jonathan Gruber recently stated, “It’s unclear that companies will want to have the same insurance plan in 2014 that they have in 2010.”
These facts have not gone unnoticed by the public and are considered by many to be a significant turnaround from earlier analyses, where people took at face value the President’s oft-stated words: “If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan, period.” Obama declared in a speech to the American Medical Association last June, “No one will take it away, no matter what.” In fact, the New York Times recently reported that the government calculates that while 70 percent of small-business plans will remain grandfathered in 2011 that number will drop to 34 percent in 2013. Apparently, even the routine changes that occur every year as employers search for better products can be defined as changing the plan enough to obviate the provision that allows you to keep your current insurance, potentially leading to increasing costs for employer and employee alike.
Subsequent analysis of the Internet, blogosphere, the print and electronic media, as well as new social media sources (such as Twitter) has shown that the public is aware of this shift. The results of the Healthcare NarrativeTracker Index™ (NTI™) were reported by OpenConnect, the leading company in event-driven intelligence solutions, and The Global Language Monitor, the media analytics company.
“Policies need to be evaluated by the effect they will have on the cost incurred with their implementation. The economics of healthcare reform need to be based on changes that help pay for themselves rather than make the problem worse. Only by realizing the type of efficiencies that have kept America in the forefront of world economic growth for the past century and a half will we be able to keep costs under current projections. All that is necessary is to summon the courage to make the tough choices ahead,” said Edward M.L. Peters, CEO of OpenConnect and author of The Paid-for Option, which details the methodology that has proven effective in the healthcare industry.
The Healthcare NarrativeTracker has detected rising concern about price increases perceived to be associated with the implementation of yet-to-be written regulations. The public is well-aware of the overall trillion dollar cost of the program, as well as associated costs, such as the so-called ‘Doc Fix’ not directly counted with the Healthcare Reform effort budget.
In the first three months of this year, conversations about keeping the price of insurance low were exceeded by conversations with those concerned about the rising costs of their healthcare by some 40%.
In the same manner, in the first three months of this year, conversations about keeping one’s insurance were surpassed by those about losing their insurance by some 54%. For the first six months of this year, the conversations about keeping one’s insurance were surpassed by those about losing their insurance by some 43% but with volume of the conversations increasing over 11,200%.
In summation, the media discussion resonating throughout the Internet, blogosphere and social media is driving the online discussion and conversations. This is particularly true when such narratives are being driven by articles such as those written by Dr. Marc Siegel who concludes, “the regulations impose a major vise on private insurance, restricting a company’s ability to increase cost sharing (such as coinsurance, deductibles and out-of pocket limits) as well as copayments (“more than the sum of medical inflation plus 15 percentage points or $5 increased by medical inflation”). So it is unlikely that many insurers will be able to remain viable without raising premiums (not restricted by the regulations) or slashing services.”
The NarrativeTracker Index is the first product specifically designed to use social media-based monitoring to better understand the issues driving healthcare reform. Because the Healthcare NTI is based on the national discourse, it provides a real-time, accurate picture of what the public is saying about any topic related to healthcare, at any point in time. In addition to the NTI, the NarrativeTracker Arc™ follows the rise and fall of sub-stories within the main narrative to provide a comprehensive overview of the opinions surrounding a single issue.
The NTI is based on the GLM’s Predictive Quantities Indicator™ (PQI™). The PQI tracks the frequency of words and phrases in global print and electronic media on the Internet, throughout the Blogosphere and other social media outlets as well as accessing proprietary databases. The PQI is a weighted index that factors in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum, and velocity.
The Healthcare NTI is released monthly. The first analysis completed in May 2010 details the various narratives surrounding Massachusetts Healthcare reform, a healthcare model which has been adopted in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as the national healthcare reform bill.
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Air Date: Week of July 2, 2010
The BP oil disaster is a failure of technology and lexicology. The words that we use to describe the Gulf of Mexico disaster don’t begin to define the scope of the catastrophe. Is it a spill? A gusher? Host Jeff Young tracks the flow of words with Paul Payak from the Global Language Monitor.
YOUNG: Millions – maybe billions – of words have been written about BP’s runaway oil well. Yet words still fail us—we still lack the right term for what’s happening in the Gulf. So we turn to Paul JJ Payack for guidance. He’s President of the Global Language Monitor in Austin, Texas, where he tracks changes in the language, including the words most often used to describe the oil in the Gulf.
PAYACK: Overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, the top word is oil spill, which is sort of a disappointment. Many times when you have new events in a language, the language leads the event. You can actually… there are new words that pop up in profusion.
YOUNG: Uh huh.
PAYACK: And, in this case, we haven’t seen that many new words. What we’ve seen is the old way to describe an oil spill. The Exxon Valdez has a crash, spills the oil out, and that’s a spill. But this is different; this is a lot different than a spill.
YOUNG: Because a spill connotes a fixed amount that spilled from a container into where you don’t want it. That’s not what’s happening here at all.
PAYACK: In our case, we’re not talking about a spill, we’re talking about an oil field that’s estimated at 3, 4, 5 billion barrels erupting, but we still refer to it as a spill.
Austin, Texas, July 2, 2010. The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed a great many terrible, sad and historical events, with a few, unfortunately fleeting moments of great joy sprinkled between the dirges. We have done our best to analyze the impact of these events on the global print and electronic media as well as on the Internet, throughout the blogosphere, and now the emerging social media.
After analyzing political speeches for a decade now, as well as all 55 Presidential Inaugural Addresses and transcripts of historical interest (including Washington’s Farewell Address, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, FDR’s ‘Live in Infamy’ radio address, Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech) you would think that we had seen and heard everything by now.
However, it wasn’t until our analysis of the President’s Gulf Spill Oval Office address, that we experienced the full force of the Internet’s fury scorned.
And this for an analysis that we considered basically non-newsworthy.
President Obama had given yet another address to the nation. GLM used the same standardized, widely available, language tools that we used to name Obama’s Grant Park “Yes, we can!” victory address as one that ranked with the greatest of presidential orations. Now these same standardized, time-tested tools are being conveniently criticized as of questionable repute.
We were told that our analysis was either ‘bashing Obama’ or ‘excusing Obama’. At the same time, we were either ‘insulting the people’ or ‘insulting the President’. Finally, it was suggested that we were rather transparently calling for the President to ‘dumb down the rhetoric’ so that one and all might understand the superior intelligence of ‘his highness’. Whoa!
Apparently, many readers never got over the headline, missing the actual analysis and what the numbers told us about the speech. Our concern was that our initial headline, Obama Oil Spill Speech Echoes Elite, Aloof Ethos might be considered demeaning to the President. Wrong. It was considered demeaning to everyone on the Left and the Right.
For general information on the readability tests used by GLM, click here.
For scientific literature about readability tests, enter Flesch or readability into the ERIC database.
It was also enlightening to see a significant proportion of this criticism to be ad hominem attacks, focusing on ourselves rather than our analysis. (Read FAQ about GLM and Paul JJ Payack here.)
This past December, we encountered fierce criticism from the Chinese government dailies because we named ‘The Rise of China” as the No. 1 news story of the decade. (You can follow the narrative arc of this controversy here. ) But the criticism that accompanied the Obama Gulf Spill speech, was a good bit nastier, indeed.
Our analyses of the three preceding US Presidential elections were praised from many quarters from the New York Times to Nicholas Kristof to NPR to the worldwide media. During the preceding ten years, few alleged political motivation, or denounced the standard language-measurement tools as inherently flawed. In fact, as long as readers basically agreed with the more predictable outcomes, there were few complaints. Here were some of those results: Ross Perot scored the lowest we’ve ever recorded, John F, Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were stars, both Bushes settled in the middle of the middle school years, and Obama’s ‘Yes, we can!’ speech had nearly equivalent numbers to Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream’ speech and Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address’. So far, so good. We did have a few outliers, such as Sarah Palin achieving quite a high score during her debate with Joe Biden, which was duly noted by New York Magazine and quite easy to explain.
Here’s what we attempted to communicate:
1. Obama’s speech, though deserving a ‘solid B’ did not live up to his past efforts.
2. Obama’s most well-regarded speech came in a at 7.4 grade level. This is not talking down to the American people. This is communicating clear and concisely to his audience. This is Obama at his best, communicating with a deft combination of vision, passion and rhetoric.
In fact, our headline for that effort read: Obama’s “Yes, We Can” Speech Ranked with “I have a Dream,” “Tear Down this Wall,” and JFK Inaugural. Rather high praise, indeed.
Our commentary read:
Obama’s “Yes, We Can” speech delivered Tuesday night in Chicago’s Grant Park ranked favorably in tone, tenor and rhetorical flourishes with memorable political addresses of the recent past including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech, “Tear Down this Wall,” by Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address.
“As is appropriate for a forward-looking message of hope and reconciliation, words of change and hope, as well as future-related constructions dominated the address,” said Paul JJ Payack President and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “Evidently, Obama is at his best at connecting with people at the 7th to 8th grade range, communicating directly to his audience using simple yet powerful rhetorical devices, such as the repetition of the cadenced phrase ‘Yes, we can’, which built to a powerful conclusion.”
Well-regarded, indeed (and well-deserved).
3. GLM and our predecessor site, yourDictionary.com have analyzed every presidential inaugural since that of George Washington. The idea was, and continues to be, to look at the presidents’ words in the total historical context of the American presidency.
In 2001, we were quoted as saying,
Our goal was to spot trends that are all to easily overlooked in the political (and all too partisan) passions of the moment” [and continued that our] analysis included patterns of word usage choices, the use of such grammatical constructions as passive voice, the length of words and sentences, the number of paragraphs, and other parameters of language to gauge the content [including] the well-regarded Flesch-Kincaid Reading Scale.
4. The use of Industry-standard language analytics. The Fogg Index, the Flesch Test, the Flesch-Kinkaid Reading Scale, and many others, are used in all forms of publishing from technical manuals to ensuring proper comprehension levels for textbooks used for various ages and classes. This has been true for more than fifty years.
The reason we choose to use the standard tests and analytical tools was a simple one: to enable the same set of measurements over any period of time. And also that these analyses could be replicated by scholars and historians and journalists the world over.
5. We use our proprietary tool, the Predictive Quantities Indicator or PQI to measure media analytics, narrative tracking, and TrendTopper Media Buzz, as such we do not use the PQI for this task.
By the Way, here are a few historical precedents;
Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 — 12.0.
Lincoln-Douglas debates, 1858 — Stephen Douglas’ seven speeches averaged a 12th-grade level 11.9; Lincoln’s averaged 11.2.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration of war in December 1941 — 11.5.
Nixon-Kennedy Debates, 1960 — The first nationally televised debates: Kennedy, 9.6 ; Nixon, 9.1.
Cheney-Lieberman, V.P. Debate — Lieberman, 9.9; Dick Cheney, 9.1.
And for good measure, Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be Soliloquy’, Shakespeare, c. 1600, comes in at 10.6.
Now Kathleen Parker has considerably upped the ante when applied readability statistics in her premise about Barack Obama as the first ‘feminine president’ ….
The usual key to staying on top in the murky world of politics is to control the narrative. And, by all linguistic accounts, Barack Obama’s control of the oil spill narrative has slipped away.
Lonely warrior. Barack Obama counting tar balls on a Louisiana beach in May 2010. (Larry Downing/Reuters)
In his first prime-time address from the Oval Office recently, Obama attempted to take back the reins by employing warrior-like language.
In his best Churchill impression, he spoke about “the battle we’re waging against an oil spill that is assaulting our shores and our citizens,” going on to vow that “we will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes.”
The president then talked about creating a battle plan as well as the need to develop energy independence and to “fight for the America we want for our children.”
The president then talked about creating a battle plan as well as the need to develop energy independence and to “fight for the America we want for our children.”
In fact, Obama’s rhetoric around America’s biggest environmental disaster has intensified in recent weeks.
Accused of not being angry enough at the company that has still not managed to fully plug a gushing oil well, “No Drama” Obama, as he was once known, is using tougher language and framing the oil spill as an environmental 9/11.
He also uttered the now oft-quoted explanation of why he’s spending so much time talking to experts: So he can “know whose ass to kick.”
Oil-spill enabler
But in this unfolding drama, with a wavering protagonist, a motley crew of characters and a slick, unrelenting enemy, one is compelled to shout in frustration: “Words, words, words!”
Duelling narratives
(An unscientific, comparison)
BP: Use remotely operated underwater vehicles to try to reactivate blowout preventer.
Political narrative: Remotely control response, i.e. let Coast Guard handle it.
BP: Introduce small tube into burst pipe to slow flow.
Political narrative: Introduce oil spill commission and temporarily stop offshore drilling
BP: Drill relief wells, this is going to take awhile.
Political narrative: Drill home the need for relief/compensation (this is going to take awhile)
Therein lies the problem, says language analyst Paul Payack. Words alone mean nothing if they are not backed up by action and, as a result, Obama has lost control of what he wants to say.
“He who wins control of the narrative controls the story in terms of political capital,” says Payack. And at the moment, Obama isn’t doing so well, which could hurt his party in the November mid-term elections.
According to Payack, the most important storyline currently defining the president is “Obama as oil spill enabler.”
