Austin, Texas, June 6, 2017 — According to the Global Language Monitor, Covfefe has been validated as an English-language word. This according to the methodology established early in the 21st century by GLM. Earlier today, a simple Google search resulted in some 17,000,000 citations, with close to 500,000 news stories. Baidu, the Chinese ‘Google-equivalent’ also produced a cascading number of Covfefe-related citations.
According to Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst for GLM, “The Global Language Monitor put into place this ‘Optimized for the Wired World’ methodology that can test new words and phrases from the entire global English linguasphere. To be considered, the word must fulfill global, as well as geographic and demographic requirements. Covfefe met these criteria earlier today.
A Methodology Optimized for the Wired World -- GLM’s Word of the Year rankings are based upon actual word usage throughout the English-speaking world, which now approaches some 2.38 billion people, who use the language as a first, second, business language. 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 profession or social group or geography. The goal is to find the word usage that will endure the test of time.
Global Language Monitor also uses these newly available technologies to document the Words of the Year for Global English, with the idea to encapsulate and capture the essence of the preceding twelve months in a sort of linguistic amber.
Accordingly, GLM has updated its Top Trending Words of 2017 (#WOTY2017) to include ‘covfefe’. Covfefe currently occupies the No. 12A position between No. 12 ‘wikileaks,’ and No. 13, ‘Non-binary,’ as to the definition of the word, there are any number of contenders swirling about. Most seem to revolve about various SpellCheck suggestions: such as Coffee, Coif, kerfuffle, and, of course, coverage.
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.
For more information, call 1.512.801.6823 or email info@LanguageMonitor.com, tweet to @languageMonitor or skype pauljjpayack.
Compendium of Fifteen of the President’s ‘Greatest Hits’
Austin, TX January 9, 2009 – The Top All-Time Bushisms were released earlier today by the Global Language Monitor (www.LanguageMonitor.com). Topping the List were:
Misunderestimate,
Mission Accomplished,
Brownie, you’ve done a heck of a job!
I’m the decider, and
I use the Google.
“The era of Bushisms is now coming to an end, and word watchers worldwide will have a hard time substituting Barack Obama’s precise intonations and eloquence for W’s unique linguistic constructions,” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “The biggest linguistic faux pas of the Obama era thus far involves the use of the reflexive pronoun myself. This is a refreshing shift from the Bush years.”
The rankings were nominated by language observers the world over and then ranked with the help of the Global Language Monitor’s PQI (Predictive-quantities Indicator). The PQI is a proprietary algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the print and electronic media, on the Internet and throughout the blogosphere.
The Top All-time Bushisms with commentary, follow.
1. Misunderestimate. Stated in the immediate aftermath of the disputed 2000 election: One of the first and perhaps most iconic Bushisms (Nov. 6, 2000).
2. Mission Accomplished: Never actually stated by the President but nevertheless the banner behind him was all that was needed to cement this phrase into the public imagination (May 1, 2003).
3. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” said to soon-to-be-discharged FEMA director Michael Brown. Stated in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; it came to symbolize the entire debacle (Sept. 2, 2005).
4. “I’m the decider” came to symbolize the ‘imperial’ aspects of the Bush presidency. Said in response to his decision to keep Don Rumsfeld on as the Secretary of Defense (April 18, 2006).
5. “I use The Google” said in reference to the popular search engine (October 24, 2006).
6. Iraq Shoe Throwing Incident. In Iraq, throwing a shoe is a symbol of immense disrespect. Some have suggested this to be the visual equivalent of a spoken Bushism — Inappropriate, surprising, embarrassing yet compelling to repeat (December 14, 2008).
7. “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully” came to symbolize the President’s environmental policy (Sept. 29, 2000).
8. “You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.” Critics used this to symbolize Bush’s detachment to the plight of the working class, said to a divorced mother of three in Omaha, Nebraska (Feb. 4, 2005)
9. “Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?” was uttered before the first primaries back in 2000 (Jan. 11, 2000).
10. “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we” was cited by his critics as revealing his true thoughts (Aug. 5, 2004)
11. It was not always certain that the U.S. and America would have a close relationship.” The President was speaking of the Anglo-American relationship (June 29, 2006).
12. “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” Explaining his Communications strategy (May 24, 2005).
13. “I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible?” scribbled on a note to Secretary of State Condi Rice during a UN Security Council meeting in 2005.
14. “When the final history is written on Iraq, it will look just like a comma” (September 24, 2006).
15. “Stay the course” was stated on numerous occasions during the course of the Iraq War. Bush’s change of course with the Surge, actually made a dramatic difference in the conflict.
Others under consideration: Stratergy and “Make the Pie Higher”.
Other Presidents of the United States created their own words, some of which have entered the standard English vocabulary. These include:
ADMINISTRATION (George Washington)
BELITTLE (Thomas Jefferson)
BULLY PULPIT (Theodore Roosevelt)
CAUCUS (John Adams)
COUNTERVAILING (Thomas Jefferson)
HOSPITALIZATION (Warren G. Harding)
MUCKRAKER (Theodore Roosevelt)
NORMALCY (Woodrow Wilson)
O.K. (Martin Van Buren)
SANCTION (Thomas Jefferson)
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, with a particular emphasis upon Global English. For more information, call 1.512.801.6823, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit www.LanguageMonitor.com.
Top Bushisms of 2006:
‘I’m the decider’ and ‘I use The Google’ Top Annual List
Flashback: ‘Brownie, You’re Doing a Heck of a Job’ Was Tops for ’05
San Diego, California (January 22, 2007) The Top Bushisms for 2006 were released earlier today by the Global Language Monitor. Topping the ’06 List were “I’m the decider“ referring to his rejection of the request from seven former generals for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to step down and “I use The Google,” in reference to the popular search engine. The rankings were nominated by language observers the world over and then ranked with the help of the Global Language Monitor’s PQI (Predictive-quantities Indicator).
“With fewer that twenty-four months remaining in the Bush presidency, word watchers worldwide are in a mad scramble to find a substitute for the near weekly faux pas presented by the president,” said Paul JJ Payack, President of the Global Language Monitor.
The PQI is a proprietary algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the print and electronic media, on the Internet and throughout the blogosphere. The words and phrases are tracked in relation to their frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets.
The Top Bushisms of 2006 with Commentary Follow.
1. “I’m the Decider.” “I’m the decider, and I decide what is best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.” Some six months later, Rumsfeld was cited as one of the major reasons for the “thumpin'” (Bush’s word) the Republicans received in the Mid-term elections. April 18th.
2. “I use The Google,” in reference to the popular search engine. October 24th. Interview with Maria Bartiromo of CNBC.
3. “It was not always certain that the U.S. and America would have a close relationship.” June 29th.
4. “I’ve got an ek-a-lec-tic reading list.” August 29th Interview with Brian Williams.
5. “The only way we can win is to leave before the job is done.” November 24th (Greely, Colorado)
6. “Stay the course.” On numerous occasions.
7. “When the final history is written on Iraq, it will look just like a comma.” September 24th. Interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN.
8. “The Congress was right to renew the Terrorist Act.” In reference to the Patriot Act. September 7th. (Washington, DC)
9. “I want to be a war president; no president wants to be a war president.” October 26th. (Des Moines)
10. “The fiscal year that ended on February the 30th.” The government fiscal year ends on September 30th; there actually was a February 30 (and 29th) before the Emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar added the days to their namesake months: July and August. October 11th (Washington, DC)
The Top Bushisms of 2005 Topping the ’05 List were: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” said to since-disgraced FEMA director Michael Brown; “In my line of work you’ve got … to kind of catapult the propaganda” explaining his Communications strategy; and “I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible?” scribbled on a note to Secretary of State Condi Rice during a UN Security Council meeting.
As War Evolves so Does Language
By Andrew Ratner, The Baltimore Sun
‘Mission accomplished’ has now become synonymous with miscalculations
Baltimore, May, 2006 — When Synthia Laura Molina tried to drum up clients for her health-management consulting firm, the reaction often was not what she anticipated. Did you consider changing the name of your business, customers would ask. Eventually, Molina and her associates felt they had no choice but to do so. Its former name: Mission Accomplished.
“When you told people the name, their initial reaction was ‘Oh, really.’ It was clear that the company name had been eroded, the company brand had been eroded,” said Molina, whose venture is known now as Central IQ. “My sense was it was so damaged, it may take a generation to lose that association.”Maybe a political group would want to buy it?,” she wondered. “Mission accomplished,” a military phrase, long ago became part of common jargon to describe a job well done. But the term took a turn for the worse after May 1, 2003.That was the day President Bush declared an end to major fighting in Iraq. He did so in front of a red, white and blue banner that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln off the Southern California coast.The power and authority of the phrase, at least in civilian usage, has since toppled like a dictator’s statue in Baghdad.
On a long list of unintended consequences and significant costs of the Iraq war, the erosion of “mission accomplished” from a widely used term of affirmation to one of miscalculation isn’t terribly significant. But it illustrates that vocabulary is shifting and organic and that overly declarative statements are probably best avoided, especially by presidents. “Rhetoric invites you to be assertive, and sometimes it’s our undoing,” said Martin Medhurst, a communications professor at Baylor University who previously directed the study of presidential rhetoric at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. “It’s like Nixon’s proclamation, ‘I’m not a crook,’ ultimately becomes the tagline for being a crook.” The term “mission accomplished” evolved in military use during World War II, usually in the context of a successful flight operation such as a strafing run or photo reconnaissance – technically a “mission,” according to A. Marjorie Taylor’s The Language of World War II in 1944. Eventually, its use became so common – and benign – it could be found on everything from plumbing tips to recipes. But during the past three years, the term has all but vanished from non-political use, particularly in the U.S. media. A search of the electronic library LexisNexis showed that the phrase is now mostly confined to references on sports pages and occasionally in news stories unrelated to war and politics in publications outside the United States. “The top references are jokes, blogs and insults. Ninety percent are negative or humorous,” said Paul Payack, who runs the Global Language Monitor in San Diego. “It’s a tagline that evokes not a smart thing to do, stepping into a trap, exactly what not to do at an apparent moment of triumph. Like ‘wardrobe malfunction,’ it just has become part of the public consciousness.”
Payack analyzes changes in the use of the words and phrases on the Internet – often, he said, for corporate clients and investors looking to track trends in the marketplace. With the use of algorithms, he has concluded, among other things, that the English language had 988,968 words as of last week and that “OK” is the most frequently spoken word on Earth.
San Diego,California (December 30, 2005) The Top Bushisms for 2005 were released earlier today by the Global Language Monitor. The rankings were based on the Global Language Monitor’s PQ (Predictive-quantities) Index. Topping the ’05 List were “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” said to since-disgraced FEMA director Michael Brown; “In my line of work you’ve got … to kind of catapult the propaganda” explaining his Communications strategy; and “I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible?” scribbled on a note to Secretary of State Condi Rice during a UN Security Council meeting. “The Global Media are continually fascinated by the Bushisms phenomenon,” said Paul JJ Payack, President of the Global Language Monitor. “In fact, President George W. Bush has provided the literary- and linguistic-minded a plethora of interesting turns of phrase over the last five years. Of course, his supporters use his frank, shoot from the hip manner of speaking as proof of Bush as a decisive man of action. This contrasts sharply, so they believe, with the precisely turned phrases of the loyal opposition that might be pleasing to the ear but lead to little or no action, compromise on the world stage or, even, worse.” The PQ (Predictive-quantities) Index is a proprietary algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the print and electronic media, on the Internet and throughout the blogosphere. The words and phrases are tracked in relation to their frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets. The Top Bushisms for 2005 follow: 1. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” To FEMA director Michael Brown, who resigned 10 days later amid criticism over his handling of the Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts. Mobile, Alabama, Sept 2, 2005 2. “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” Explaining his Communications strategy. Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005 3. “I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible?” A note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a U.N. Security Council meeting. September 14, 2005 4. “This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table.” Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 22, 2005 5. “In terms of timetables, as quickly as possible – whatever that means.” On his timeframe for Social Security Legislation. Washington D.C., March 16, 2005 Bonus: “Those who enter the country illegally violate the law.” On Illegal Immigrants or Undocumented Workers Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005
A Note on Bushisms
Other presidents have shared the same perception of linguistic ineptitude, including Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Harry S. Truman. Though Jackson was considered the ultimate back-county rube, he oversaw the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of the common man; Lincoln, thought to be a Bible-spouting baboon, is now considered one of the greatest leaders the world has ever produced; and Truman, the uneducated haberdasher, laid the basic political foundation of the Post-Modern world, which is only now yielding to, well, the post Post-Modern world (whatever that may be). This is not to say that linguistic ineptness invariably leads to greatness. History shows us that we’ve had our fill of verbally challenged chief executives who were also severely overtaxed by the burdens of office and have now fallen most ungraciously into the various dustbins of failed expectations. And then there was Warren G. Harding. He is said to have scandalously coined the term ‘hospitalization’ in the 1920s. A quick Google search shows that the word now appears on the web more than 8 million times. Well done, Warren! Not a bad legacy for a third-rate president. Like the ‘Yogi-isms’ of Baseball Hall of Famer Lawrence P. “Yogi” Berra, some of Bush’s most famous Bushisms can be found in literature many years before he supposedly coined them. ‘Resignate’ dates to the 18th century, and ‘Grecian’ as a reference to things Greek was the preferred way to describe those inhabiting the Greek Isles from the 18th century onward. Even ‘Misunderestimate’ can be found in 1960’s literature.
Truth: The Top Trending Global English Word for 2017 (#WOTY)
Covfefe Now Makes the List!
The Word Fake Rooted in Ethnic Slur Against Hindi and Muslim Holy Men
Harvard Takes the Top Politically (In)correct Word of the Year Award
for replacing House Master with Faculty Dean
June 6, 2017 (Update) Austin, TEXAS, and NEW YORK — The Global Language Monitor (GLM) today announced that Truth is the Word of the Year for 2017. GLM also announced that the Global English Word of the Year for 2016 is not a word but a meme: the blood-soaked image of Omran Daqneesh, five years old, sitting in an ambulance while awaiting treatment in Allepo, Syria. (Click Here to see Top Global English Words of 2016.)
During the last 18 months, the world of language in the Industrialized West reflected the turmoil undergoing much of the political systems throughout the Year 2016 and continuing into early 2017, said Paul JJ Payack, presdent and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor..
However, it would be a mistake to characterize this time with the World, as a whole, in turmoil. After all, having one nation exiting the EU block of some twenty-eight counties along with the the election of what by European Standards is a Center-Right government in the United States does not equate to 1914, 1939, 1968, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the on-going Middle East conflagration, and/or the emergence of China onto the world economic stage earlier this century, or even the Global Economic Restructuring of 2008 and what continues in its wake.
If you kept abreast of the daily press reports, you would think an outbreak of mass hysteria or at least amnesia had swept over the nations of the West. The world’s leading print and electronic media acted as if the concept of truth had been circumvented, or even, contravened, and sounded alarm after alarm that what we all knew as facts were no longer discernible. The source of this disruption in the news cycle, of course, was what came to be known as fake news and post-truth.
As the various organizations that announced their particular choices for their Words of the Year (WOTY), 2016 had the dubious distinction of being labeled a ‘dumpster-fire’ by the American Dialect Society thereby furthering the concept of fake news. How else could a phrase that was scarcely uttered anywhere in the world in 2016 be chosen for this ‘honor’?
For historical comparisons of a number of the terms used in this analysis, GLM used the Google Ngram Viewer. You can use the Ngram Viewer to chart frequencies of comma-delimited search strings. The Google Ngram Viewer uses yearly counts from sources printed between 1500 and 2008, though in some cases later dates of publications are included.
In the first example, frequencies of citations between and among a number of words used to describe the Top Words of the Year for 2016 are plotted between 1940 and the present.
Figure 1. Relative Frequency of citations among words used to describe the Top Words of the Year for 2016
Figure 2. Close-up on Relative Frequency Among Some Top Words of the Year for 2016
Figure 3. Comparisons for the Words Truth Vs. Lie Since 1740
This is why early in the century, the Global Language Monitor put into place a methodology that clearly states that each considered word or phrase must adhere to the published criteria (see below). The methodology calls for words and phrases from the entire global English linguasphere to be considered, as well as each fulfilling geographic and demographic requirements. This automatically excludes the lists created by those organizations that rely on polls and other such non-scientific tools
A Methodology Optimized for the Wired World -- GLM’s Word of the Year rankings are based upon actual word usage throughout the English-speaking world, which now approaches some 2.38 billion people, who use the language as a first, second, business language. 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 profession or social group or geography. The goal is to find the word usage that will endure the test of time.
Global Language Monitor began to use newly available technologies to document the Words of the Year for Global English at the turn of the 21st century, with the idea to encapsulate and capture the essence of the preceding twelve months in a sort of linguistic amber.
Consider for a moment that fact that in 2009 GLM named ‘twitter’ as the Global English Word of the Year, not only as a social media phenomenon but as a potential Weapon of Mass Disruption (or even destruction). Witness: 1) the Arab Spring and 2) the actions of one Donald J. Trump.
Political Correctness
In a time so debilitated by the specter of political correctness (both from the left and the right), it seems rather demeaning to advance the concept of ‘fake news’, once you study its etymology, tracing back the origins of the word ‘fake’.
Cambridge Dictionaries’ definition of fakir: A Muslim (or, loosely, a Hindu) religious ascetic who lives solely on alms. Origin: Early 17th century: via French from Arabic faqīr. Fakir, Arabic Faqīr (“poor”), originally, a mendicant dervish. In mystical usage, the word fakir refers to man’s spiritual need for God, who alone is self-sufficient. Although of Muslim origin, the term has come to be applied in India to Hindus as well.
Fakirs are generally regarded as holy men who are possessed of miraculous powers, such as the ability to walk on fire or to subsist by looking only at the face of God.
In a Languagelog posting by Mark Liberman, How Fakirs Became Fakers, Edmund Wilson comments (from the grave) that Fakirs began to become entwined with fakers with a common usage that arose out of the American spiritualism craze of the 19th century. This is where one can witness the shift in meaning for the word fakir, from an Islamic religious ascetic to the Hindu “Yogi,” to a sort of street corner or carnival barker or “producer of illusions”.
In other words ‘fake news” joins a long list of ethnic slurs that have imbued American English since before the founding of the republic. They are too many to repeat. However the most common of these might be ‘ethnic-group’ giver’ or ‘ethnic-group rich’. Specifically, using the term fake news could be said to humiliate and/or cast aspersions upon Muslim and/or Hindu holy men. Recent searches of the New York Times found 869 instances of ‘fake news,’ while searches of The Washington Post found 1,352. None mentioned the historical dubiousness of the practice.
You can see this linguistic shift peaking around 1940 and continuing to this day.
Figure 4. Shift in Meaning Between Fakir and Faker During the 1940s
In retrospective, even the whole idea of fake news and post-truth is a bit of an over-reaction. The organizations that were disrupted the most by the appearance of unchecked, non-verifiable and inadequately sourced stories, were those upon which the world came to rely and depend upon to safeguard the information delivered to their audiences as verifiably true. To continue in these roles as stewards of truth, it was incumbent upon them to put into place new methods of testing information.
The unvarnished truth is that the dominant news gathering and distribution organizations fell behind the curve as sources of information multiplied by orders of magnitude. Neither did they comprehend the astonishingly rapid advances in computing power. Finally, the evolution of communication and social media tools advanced far more quickly than the old line media’s ability to adapt to and absorb them.
Decades of reporting on the decline of the US manufacturing base never seemed to register to old media as applicable lessons for themselves. In the mid-’80s, an HBS case study inquired as to which fared better — companies with strategic plans in place or those that had none. The answer: a dead heat. Apparently, companies without strategic plans were able to adjust more quickly to changing market conditions while companies with strategic plans all too often, steadfastly rode these plans straight into oblivion. (For more information on this phenomenon, check ou the first two editions of In Search of Excellence. Prepare to be shocked.)
What is Truth?
The debate over what is truth has been ongoing since the search for an ‘honest man’ by Diogenes the Cynic, the dialogues of Socrates as recorded by Plato, the Confessions of Augustine, the Summa of Aquinas, and the monastic scriptoria of Medieval Europe.
In the scriptoria of the Middle Ages, an elaborate system was constructed to ensure that no discrepancies were introduced into Scripture or highly-prized scholarly works — before the coming of movable type and the printing press. Can you imagine the decibel level of a discussion that played out over the misrepresentation of a single iota when dealing with the work of a Church Father, the Apostle Peter (or Paul), or the words of the Lord himself? This, of course, was complicated by the fact that there were few grammatical rules, little or no punctuation, no spaces between and among words, nor between sentences or paragraphs, and the like.
Even the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Harvard and Yale engaged in the same sort of tussle about the owner of Truth as the Right and Left are engaged in today. Harvard chose the Latin word Veritas (Truth) on its official seal, while Yale considered the matter closed by adding Lux et Veritas. (Light and Truth) to its own shield. Three hundred years later, in an academic world perhaps overly concerned with political correctness, Harvard won top honors for the Top Politically (in)Correct Word of 2016.
Watching the nightly news and reading the traditional (for the last two centuries, that is) media, one has the distinct sense that what they perceive as unprecedented almost chaotic circumstances is actually that of the normalcy of the new reality, that of communications at the speed of light that the internet has foisted upon us.
We keep hearing about this most unusual of election cycles, but this is only true when looking through the prism (and historical construct) of the traditional news gathering operations. What is called the 24-hour News Cycle is actually just the tip of the tsunami washing over the planet at an ever-quicker pace. Indeed, the nature of the beast hasn’t changed at all. It is our outdated techniques, that haven’t kept up with the new reality: News now emanates at the speed of thought, from tens of thousands or, even, millions of sources.
Can you imagine the uproar in the monastic world when documents would be would be produced with little or no vetting against the time-honored standards?
In 2008 GLM published an article, “Is Merriam-Webster its own Best Frenemy,” where we noted that its newest additions to its Collegiate Dictionary, were older than most entering college students at the time (28 years vs 18!) Indeed, for the most part, technology could solve most of the Post-truth and Fake News phenomena.
Since the turn of the 21st century, the Global Language Monitor (GLM) has named the Top Words of Global English. A decade earlier, the American Dialect Society began to name the Word of The Year for mostly American (and a bit of British) English with little or no use of the then emerging computer power. By the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, the BBC chose the Global Language Monitor to determine the Top English Words of the Decade worldwide while they chose an UK-based Linguist to highlight those of the UK.
One of the most surprising trends in the evolution of the Words of the Year over the last two decades is that they have become decidedly more parochial, and more trivial, as the century has progressed. Now there are about a dozen players, all competing for the same space, so the race has been one of dumbing down the various nominees and ultimate winner in an apparently. desperate in their attempt to seek the lowest common denominator, or even worse, to optimize entertainment value.
Perhaps most surprising of all is the apparent lack of preparation by the venerable incumbent organizations responsible for gathering, sifting through, and certifying information that then qualifies as verifiably newsworthy.
Apocalyptic language has been widely cited as word of the year worthy for the last several years — and rightly so. In fact, Apocalypse and Armageddon took Global Language Monitors’ honors as Top Global English Words of 2012. And though GLM’s proprietary algorithms have displayed a predictive element, it’s entirely possible that Apocalyptic language did indeed peak some five years too soon.
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 1.512.801-6823, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit www.LanguageMonitor.com.
Apocalyptic language has been widely cited as word of the year worthy for the last several years — and rightly so. In fact, Apocalypse and Armageddon took Global Language Monitors’ honors as Top Global English Words of 2012. And though GLM’s proprietary algorithms have displayed a predictive element, it’s entirely possible that Apocalyptic language did indeed peak some three years too soon.
The Top Words, Phrases, and Names since the Turn of the Century
Over the years the Global Language Monitor and David Letterman have crossed paths a number of times. This Top Ten List send-up remains among our favorites!
And Finally the Top Global Word of the Year for 2016 (and a bit of 2017), and it’s not a word …
But rather a Meme!
The world of language in the Industrialized West reflected the turmoil undergoing much of the political systems throughout the Year 2016 and continuing into early 2017. However, it would be a mistake to characterize 2016 as a year with the World, as a whole, in Turmoil. After all, having one nation exiting the EU block of some twenty-eight counties along with the the election of what by European Standards is a Center-Right government in the United States does not equate to 1914, 1939, the emergence of China onto the world economic stage earlier this century, or even the Global Economic Restructuring of 2008 and what continues to in its wake.
Since the Global Language Monitor began to use the newly available techniques and technologies to document the Words of the Year for Global English at the turn of the 21st century, the tumult of the preceding twelve months can be put into a more or less shocking perspective. After all, in 2009 GLM named ‘twitter’ as the Global English Word of the Year, not as a social media phenomenon but as a potential Weapon of Mass Disruption (or even destruction). Witness, one President Trump.
And even the whole idea of fake news and post-truth is a bit of an over-reaction. Of course, there needs to be put into place new methods of testing information. Perhaps one of the oldest scholarly methods could be updated to the present day — with all information being checked against ‘original sources’.
The debate over what is news and what is truth has been ongoing since the dialogues of Plato, the monastic scriptoria of Medieval Europe, where an elaborate system was constructed to ensure that no discrepancies were introduced into Scripture or highly-prized scholarly works — before the coming of movable type and the printing press. Can you imagine the decibel-level of a discussion tha played out over the misrepresentation of a single letter when dealing with the work of a Church Father, the Apostle Peter (or Paul), or the Word of The Lord Himself?
There is the sense that we are witnessing an unprecedented historical event; historical in the sense that we now appear to be standing astride (or atop) a cusp in history, a delta, a decision point, what is now called a point of inflection or inflection point.
Watching the nightly news and reading the traditional (for the last two centuries, that is) media, one has the distinct sense that what they perceive as unprecedented almost chaotic circumstances is actually that of the normalcy of the new reality, that of communications at the speed of light that the internet has foisted upon us.
We keep hearing about this most unusual of election cycles, but this is only true when looking through the prism (and historical construct) of the traditional news gathering operations. What is called the 24-hour News Cycle is actually just the tip of the Tsunami washing over the planet at a steady speed and ever-quicker pace. Indeed, the nature of the beast hasn’t changed at all. It is our outdated techniques, that haven’t kept up with the new reality: News now emanates at the speed of thought, from thousands or, even, tens of thousands or eenmillions of sources.
Can you imagine the uproar in the monastic world when documents would be would be produced with little or no vetting against the time-honored standards?
In 2008 GLM published an article, “Is Merriam-Webster its own Best Frenemy,” Where we noted that its newest additions to its Collegiate Dictionary, were older than most entering college students at the time (28 years vs 18!) Indeed, for the most part, technology could solve most of the Post-truth and Fake News phenomenon.
Since the turn of the 21st century, the Global Language Monitor (GLM) has named the Top Words of Global English. A decade earlier, the American Dialect Society began to name the Word of The Year for mostly American (and a bit of British) English with little or no use of the then emerging computer power. By the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, the BBC chose the Global Language Monitor to determine the Top English Words of the Decade worldwide while they chose an UK-based Linguist to highlight those of the UK.
Methodology: GLM’s Word of the Year rankings are based upon actual word usage throughout the English-speaking world, which now approaches some 2.38 billion people, who use the language as a first, second, business language. 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 350,000 print and electronic global media (not limited to the English-language-based media), as well as new social media sources as they emerge.
One of the most surprising trends in the evolution of the Words of the Year over the last two decades is that they have become decidedly more parochial, and more trivial, as the century has progressed. Now there about a dozen players, all competing for the same space, so the race has been one of dumbing down the various nominees and ultimate winner in an apparently. desperate in their attempt to seek the lowest common denominator, or even worse, to optimize entertainment value.
The words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 2 billion speakers (January 2017 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 1.512.801-6823, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit www.LanguageMonitor.com.
Apocalyptic language has been widely cited as word of the year worthy for the last several years — and rightly so. In fact, Apocalypse and Armageddon took Global Language Monitors’ honors as Top Global English Words of 2012. And though GLM’s proprietary algorithms have displayed a predictive element, it’s entirely possible that Apocalyptic language did indeed peak some three years too soon. In 2016,
1
Bigly
Of considerable size, number, quantity, extent, or magnitude; large.
2
Brexit
The British Exit from the European Union.
3
Non-binary
The legal term for a gender identity between male and female
4
The Love Symbol
[a glyph that merges the ancient symbols for man and woman]: the unpronounceable symbol representing “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.”
5
Zika
[fever; or Zika virus disease]: an infectious disease caused by the Zika virus. The virus that causes the disease, mainly spread by the bite of Aedes mosquitoes, was first isolated in Africa in 1947.
6
Gun Culture
Gun Violence: encompasses the behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs about firearms and their usage by civilians / violence committed by the use of a gun.
7
Safe Place
In the U.S., places where students can retreat to avoid hearing unpleasant words; in the world, places protected from rape, crucifixion, being sold into slavery, etc.
8
Heroin and Fentanyl
Strong physiologically addictive narcotics
9
Hooya ha tah it 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
An euphemism for Alzheimer care.
11
Presumptive
Based on probability or presumption.
12
Texticate
Carrying out a conversation through text messaging.
13
Clinton World
The private world of Hil and Bill where many of the laws of the political world seem to be suspended. Compare with Steve Job’s “reality distortion field.”
14
Trumpism
The emerging political philosophy of the presumptive Republican candidate, whatever that may be.
15
Tennessine
A new element on the periodic table, with Atomic number 117 and the symbol Ts.
16
Latinx
17
Post-Truth
18
Alt-right
19
Brexit
20
Trustinex
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.
The World of Business as Reflected in English Language Buzzwords, Second Edition
Austin, Texas, June 17, 2015 — The Global Language Monitor has announced the Top Business Buzzwords of the Year, for Global English, the world’s pre-eminent language of commerce.
It is often noted that the world of business includes its own specialized vocabulary, and this can certainly be found in the English language, the business language of the planet, said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor. The Top Trending Business Buzzwords of 2015 represent some six continents, which continues to confirm the ever-expanding nature of the English language. This is the second annual ranking,
GLM’s Word of the Year and Business Buzzwords 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 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 50 Business Buzzwords
Rank, Previous Rank, Change, Business Buzzword, Comment
2015 2013 Change Business Buzzword Comment
1 1 0 Content — Far and away the No. 1 Business Buzzword
2 37 35 Net-Net — Consider a sportswriter for the Brooklyn Nets basketball team: The net-net for the Nets was the netting of the final shot.
3 10 7 Big Data — Soon Human Knowledge will be doubling every second. ’Big’ does not begin to describe what’s coming at us.
4 19 15 At-the-end-of-the-day — More likely the end of the quarter or fiscal year
5 2 -3 Social Media Reality — Social media impacts less than 15% of the Web
6 15 9 Offline / be offline — The statement is meaningless unless one includes cell phones, tablets, smart TVs, not to mention all atomic clocks.
7 41 34 Facetime — Before it was a product, it was a meeting with a C-Level executive.
8 9 1 Ping — High-tech lingo seeping into the mainstream; now it means to get back to you. Originally, a tool to send message packets to a network address to measure the time & quality of the response.
9 44 35 Rock-and-a-hard-place — A supposedly intractable situation though it usually gets back on track (Our ‘between Iraq and a hard place’ is being replaced because of the on-going political situation}
10 20 10 Win-Win — Much more positive than tie-tie or lose-lose
11 35 24 As if it was — Used some four times more than the correct as if it were. You know, conditional voice.
12 7 -5 Utilize (rather than use) — Please deflate the diction and utilize the word use
13 5 -8 Literally — Principally used in a non-literal situation, e.g., “Literally, an explosion of laughter.
14 11 -3 Any noun used as a verb — To concept. To ballpark, and the like …
15 6 -9 Guru — Someone moderately skilled in a subject or particular field (cf. rocket scientist or a brain surgeon).
16 42 26 Re-purpose — Finding a new use for an old solution. Unfortunately, anything thing can be re-purposed, including your job (or yourself).
17 8 -9 Robust — Applies to oh-so-many products: software, tablets (computer and otherwise), coffee, perfume, mileage, and hundreds of others
18 38 20 Value-add — P+E+VA, where Product (is P) + Enhancement (is Ε ), and Value add (is VA)
19 4 -15 Transparency — Remains a goal far from corporate reality; perhaps a handy scale would be 1} Opaque, 2} Translucent, 3) Transparent.
20 12 -8 Seamless — Seldom actually seamless (Cf. Obamacare website), often merely seem less or meaningless
21 3 -18 Sustainability — No. 1 Word in 2007; have been rising in BizBuzz every year
22 51 29 Hashtag — The number-sign and pound- sign grows more powerful every day.
23 16 -7 Bandwidth — Measurement of electronic communications devices to send and receive information with upper and lower limits
24 40 16 Glass is half-full — Used nine times more that glass is half empty
25 22 -3 Pro-active — Evidently better than amateur-active
26 46 20 Quick-and-dirty — Cited tens of thousands of times; we prefer quick-and-clean
27 18 -9 Synergy — The interaction of two efforts that result in a greater return than the sum of the two
28 14 -14 The Cloud — Everything (and everyone) now apparently lives in the cloud through networking clouds pre-date the web by a decade or two
29 36 7 In the Cloud — Yes, dwelling within the Cloud merits a special mention.
30 21 -9 Game changer — A step way below a paradigm-shift but still usually an exaggeration nonetheless.
31 48 17 Touch base — Another baseball allusion: if you don’t actually touch the base you are called out. Cf Cricket allusions, such as using sticky wicket for a quandary.
32 13 -19 Moving Forward — From the results of those countless moving forwards, moving sideways might be more appropriate
33 23 -10 Rock Star — Whats the hierarchy among Guru, Rocket Scientist, Brain Surgeon, and Rock Star?
34 39 5 Future proof — In reality, an impossible feat because it assumes you are cognizant of future events; in Marketing, just another day of concepting.
35 47 12 Push the envelope — A phrase few actually understand; Originally a descriptor of breaking through the sound barrier by X-Series Test Pilots (e.g., X-15).
36 33 -3 Ballpark — Another name for a guesstimate (another baseball allusion).
37 31 -6 Multi-task — Swapping in and out of tasks quickly is the key to multitasking not doing many things as once which actually decreases productivity (as imagined by Dave Nelson and other tech industries leaders in the 1970s).
38 30 -8 110% — We believe it’s time to synchronize the exertion scale. As a hiring manager, how do you compare 110% from an Ivy school with an exertion level of 130% from the Big Ten?
39 26 -13 Resonate — Produce or be filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound, belief or emotion
40 29 -11 Deliverable — An output, product, result, or outcome; a term of great flexibility.
41 27 -14 Monetize — The attempt to transmute Internet lead into gold.
42 34 -8 Flounder — A ship might founder along New England’s rocky coastline. Over time the act of foundering became collated with flounder the fish. Your grasp of the language is telegraphed by this confusion.
43 32 -11 Rocket science — One step up (or down) from a guru; nearly equivalent to a Brain surgeon).
44 17 -27 New paradigm — Revolutionary new ideas that change the then-existing worldview; think Copernicus, think Newton, think Einstein, most definitely not your next product.
45 28 -17 Double Down — To double an investment in an already risky proposition.
46 43 -3 Brain surgery — One step up (or down) from a guru; equivalent to a Rocket Scientist.
47 45 -2 Bleeding edge — Leading edge of the leading edge (top ten percent).
48 50 2 Low-hanging fruit — Easy pickin’s for the sales force; unfortunately, obsolete since 2008
49 24 -25 30,000 foot level — Let’s decide if we are viewing the topic from the 30,000-, 40,000-, or 100,000-foot level. Airlines typically fly at a 35,000-foot cruise level
50 49 -1 Herding cats — Used in high-tech circles for several decades regarding controlling headstrong engineers, a seemingly impossible task.
51 25 -26 Out-of-the-Box (experience) — OOBE is ever more important to the marketing of consumer electronic devices.
This study is updated from earlier in the year.
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 375,000 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.
Paris Towers Over World of Fashion as Top Global Fashion Capital for 2015
The Global Language Monitor’s 11th Annual Survey
Paris nearly doubled Scores of New York and London
Where’s Milano? (No. 6)
Paris Fashion Week, Autumn 2015, New York and Austin, Texas — Paris has stunned New York City toppling it from its one year reign as the Top Global Fashion Capital in the Global Language Monitor’s 11th Annual survey. London remained in the third spot as did L.A.at No. 4.
Rounding out the Top Ten were Rome, Milano, Barcelona, Berlin and Madrid, followed by Tokyo. Currently, there are fifty-six fashion capitals being charted, with a number under watch for 2016. In 2015 GLM added one city to the analysis, Washington, DC, which made a splash, er belly flopped, to No. 53.
Paris redevient la capitale mondiale de la mode
Moving up from No.12 to No.6 word ordinarily send the City’s Fashion Establishment into an ecstatic state. No so, if you are Milano. And especially so if you followed Roma, at No. 5.
Last March, Milano was the Top Fashion Buzzword for 2015 followed by, Suede, Booty, and Kate’s Baby Girl. However, this is a far cry from the Top Global Fashion Capital ranking, where Milano then ranked No. 12. Much of the internet mediabuzz, not all of it positive, revolves upon these efforts to revive its ‘brand’. Recent reports from Milano Moda Donna 2015 were mixed
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 (with Paris, New York and London). Currently, the No. 4 spot is occupied by LA, which GLM sees as representing the Red Carpet phenomenon.
After an extraordinary two-year reign (2011-2012), London has settled into the No. 3 spot, comfortably behind Paris and New York — for the second year in a row. London also took the third spot in all four major areas of measurement used in determining the annual rankings for the Global Language Monitor.
.
Last year New York topped Paris by less than .05%, the tightest margin ever; this year Paris returned the favor — and then some — by nearly doubling New York’s score. In another first, Paris topped all four categories worldwide.
“In a world torn by war, repression, and the brutal subjugation of women and girls, fashion remains a bastion of self-expression.” said Paul JJ Payack, Chief Word Analyst and president of GLM. “And fashion can be a force for good that can be experienced in a positive manner in every culture and tradition.”
Sydney remains strong as Melbourne falters; for the first time New Delhi and Mumbai resulted in a virtual dead heat.
The Global Fashion Capitals for Swimwear were Miami, Barcelona, and Bali.
Barcelona, Berlin and Madrid remain hot as does what we are calling the East Asian Cluster: Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Seoul remains on the outside, very outside, of the cluster at No. 56.
The Top Global Fashion Capital Rankings are listed below, in the format: Ranking, Fashion Capital, and Previous Position.
The Watch List for 2016 includes: Abidjan, Accra, Auckland, Beirut, Jakarta, Kuala Lampur, and Lagos.
Top Fashion Capitals by Region
Europe:
Paris, London, Rome, Milano, Barcelona, Berlin, Madrid, Florence, Monaco, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Frankfurt.
India:
Mumbai, New Delhi (statistical dead heat)
Australia:
Sydney, Melbourne
East Asia:
Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Seoul
RSA:
Cape Town, Johannesburg
Middle Europe:
Moscow, Prague, Vienna, St Petersburg, Warsaw and Krakow
Canada:
Toronto, Montreal,and Vancouver,
Mideast:
Dubai, Abu Dhabi
Spain:
Barcelona, Madrid
Latin America:
Sao Paulo, Rio de Janerio, Buenos Aires, Caracas, , Santiago and Mexico City
Regional US:
New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Boston, Las Vegas, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, San Francisco, Austin and Washington, DC
Methodology: 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 longitudinal-study encompasses the prior three years to better assess short-term velocity and longer-term momentum. The 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 the eleventh edition of the survey, which was first made public in 2007.
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.
D) A lowly scrap of paper that may decide who will be the next leader of the free world?
All four answers are correct. Chad is also the name of a couple of major league baseball players and one half of a British pop-singing duo from the ’60s.
But if you guessed “D,” you are informed enough to understand the vote counting process in Florida.
Politicians are tossing the term “chad” around as if everyone were familiar with the word. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore’s campaign adviser, George Mitchell, is among them.
“You can run those machine ballots through five times and you’ll get five different totals because the chads fall off with each count,” he said, explaining on “Fox News Sunday” the reason he believes ballots in Florida should be recounted by hand.
But Mitchell’s use of “chads” betrayed his own lack of familiarity with the word. “Chad is its own plural,” said Paul J.J. Payack, president and CEO of yourdictionary.com, which is based in California.
The Web site www.yourdictionary.com defines the word as follows:
1. The confetti-like scrap punched out of cards or paper tape (also “chaff,” “computer confetti” or “keypunch droppings”).
2. The perforated strips on the edge of paper for sprocket feed printers after they have been separated from the printed portion (also “perf,” “perfory,” or “snaf”).
Etymology: Possibly from the last name of the inventor of the Chadless cardpunch, which cut U-shapes in punch cards, rather than open circles or rectangles. (The U’s formed holes when folded back.)
“Chad” would then be a back-formation from “Chadless” misunderstood: If the Chadless keypunches don’t produce it, other keypunches must produce “chad.”
The word appears to have entered the national lexicon in the late 1940s, around the time people began to refer to “bug” as a computer glitch after a researcher blamed a moth among a group of vacuum tubes for affecting ENIAC, the primitive computer powered by thousands of such tubes, said Payack. That was also about the time when IBM began using punch cards that warned users not to fold, spindle or mutilate.
In Florida, vote-counters may have wished for a “chadometer” to measure whether a bit of chad is sufficiently dislodged to qualify it as “dangling.”
When the hand recount began in Palm Beach County, the canvassing board there said it would count a vote if any of the corners of the chad were punched.
The board then decided that they would instead use the “sunlight test” — if they could see sun through an indentation, it would count.
About a quarter of the way through the counting, however, a board member determined that the light test was flawed and told the other members to go back to the first test.
According to county spokesman Bob Nichols, there are five types of chad.
Ones that count:
• Hanging door — one corner hanging off
• Swinging door — two corners hanging off
• Tri-chad — three corners hanging off
Chads that don’t count:
• Pregnant — bulges, but not punched through
• Dimple — simple indentation
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – He may mispronounce “California” and his plans for the state have been slammed as a series of “one-liners”. But even critics concede that Arnold Schwarzenegger is an effective communicator on the campaign trail.
In a page lifted from the playbook of his idol Ronald Reagan, another actor turned politician, the Austrian-born Schwarzenegger may not say much, but he says it well and often in the same way — except when he gets into a tangle over past remarks.
As far as accents go, the experts say count his as endearingly Central European. He is no “Dr. Strangelove” as Henry Kissinger was once perceived. And like a lot of politicians, Schwarzenegger seems to have a love affair with the ninth letter of the alphabet. He frequently begins sentences with “I shall”, “I will”, and “I am proud”.
He also likes to use the words “the people” and, befitting an actor who made a fortune from three films with the name “Terminator” in them, he also likes to use that noun and its verb form “terminates.”
Take for example these comments he made about “the twin Terminators of Sacramento”, Gov. Gray Davis and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante: “They have terminated jobs. They have terminated growth. They terminated dreams. It is time to terminate them.”
But where he gets into trouble, and where his wife had to put her hand over his month the other day on the Oprah show, is when he talks about women and sex as he has publicly since bursting onto the scene as a bodybuilder extraordinaire in the 1970s.
With the recall election heading into an October homestretch — courts permitting — Schwarzenegger has emerged as a polished political performer along the lines of Reagan, according to Paul J.J. Payack, president of the language monitoring Web site YourDictionary.com.
SEXISM
Payack says that the public is finding Schwarzenegger’s accent endearing. “He is both the ’Kindergarten Cop’ and ’The Terminator’. He is endearing. He is a total package and is very astute at putting himself together.” Payack told Reuters.
“With Arnold, people see his accent as friendly and familiar not frightening as in ’Dr Strangelove’. His is not a gravely, mumbly Kissinger accent,” Payack said, adding:
“He is a bright guy. He has a plan and he has been executing it. He is well-scripted and he follows the example of Ronald Reagan of ’You don’t have to say a lot but you have to say it well.’”
While avoiding debates with his opponents, Schwarzenegger has been a frequent guest on friendly celebrity talk shows — doing, for example, both the Howard Stern radio programme and Larry King’s TV show in the same day where his comments on one show were pretty much the same as the other.
On these programs and on Oprah, he has been defending himself against charges of sexism that stemmed from both a 1977 interview he gave to a men’s magazine and to other comments about women he made over the years, including an article in Esquire last July about the latest “Terminator” movie:
“When you see a blonde with great tits and a great ass, you say to yourself, hey, she must be stupid or must have nothing else to offer…. But then again there is the one that is as smart as her breasts look, great as her face looks, beautiful as her whole body looks gorgeous, you know, so people are shocked.”
This comment and another one he made about the pleasure he had in sticking his female co-star’s head in a toilet in one scene led him to a strained explanation the other at a campaign appearance:
“In ’Terminator’ we had this unbelievable fight scene, me against a female terminator and what was great about it was because we could do things, because we were two machines.
“We could hit each other. We were trying to destroy each other, me picking her up upside down and stuffing her down the toilet. She wasn’t a woman. Because she was a machine. That’s what I was trying to explain. Do you get it? It has nothing to do with women or anti-women. I love women. Trust me.”
Maybe Ronald Reagan wouldn’t say it in exactly that way.
May 1, 2017, Austin, TEXAS and NEW YORK — The Global Language Monitor (GLM) today announced that the Global English Word of the Year for 2016 is not a word but a meme: the blood-soaked image of Omran Daqneesh, five years old, sitting in an ambulance while awaiting treatment in Allepo, Syria.
Top Word of 2016 is a meme: Omran Daqneesh, Five years old, Allepo, Syria
2
Refugee
A term used to describe migrants that were forced from their homeland by war or civil unrest.
3
Bigly
Of considerable size, number, quantity, extent, or magnitude; large.
4
Brexit
British Exit from the European Union
5
Zika
Virus transmitted by mosquitoes associated with increased incidence of microcephaly in babies born to mothers infected during pregnancy. Impacted attendance at the Rio Games
6
Opioids
More deaths than gun violence and automobiles combined
7
Microaggression
The brief, everyday exchanges that send mostly unintended derogatory messages to members of various minority groups. Related to the following terms:
8
Climate Changing
GLM will now use the gerund form of the verb ‘change’ to recognize the fact of on-going, continuous condition.
9
Post-truth
Oxford: objective facts are less influential than appeals to emotion or the narrative
10
Anthropocene
The current geological age, viewed as the period during in which human activity has been a significant influence on climate and the environment;
11
White Privilege
Societal privileges that benefit people identified as white in Western countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic conditions.
12
Rio Olympics
The 2016 Summer Olympics, the Games of the XXXI Olympiad and commonly known as Rio 2016,
13
Alt-Right
Oxford: objective facts are less influential than appeals to emotion or the narrative
14
Wikileaks
Publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources.
15
Trans
Abbreviation for transgender, people who identify with the opposite of their physical characteristics.
16
Snowflake
What unconcerned students call those with the need for safe spaces and warnings about possible trigger events
17
Populism
Political movement claiming to represent the interests of ordinary people against the elite and privileged
18
Migrant
A term that includes refugees from economic, climatalogical changes, and others issues not directly related to war.
19
Evolve
The evolution of the word ‘flip-flop’ in political jargon. More like ‘survival of the fittest,’ it only occurs until the voters first shift their views on a particular subject.
20
Thug
Brought to renewed attention by President Obama; from the Hindi (and Sanskrit) words describing Aryan assassins.
During the last 18 months, the world of language in the Industrialized West reflected the turmoil undergoing much of the political systems throughout the Year 2016 and continuing into early 2017, said Paul JJ Payack, presdent and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor.
However, it would be a mistake to characterize this time with the World, as a whole, in turmoil. After all, having one nation exiting the EU block of some twenty-eight counties along with the the election of what by European Standards is a Center-Right government in the United States does not equate to 1914, 1939, 1968, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the on-going Middle East conflagration, and/or the emergence of China onto the world economic stage earlier this century, or even the Global Economic Restructuring of 2008 and what continues in its wake.
If you kept abreast of the daily press reports, you would think an outbreak of mass hysteria or at least amnesia had swept over the nations of the West. The world’s leading print and electronic media acted as if the concept of truth had been circumvented, or even, contravened, and sounded alarm after alarm that what we all knew as facts were no longer discernible. The source of this disruption in the news cycle, of course, was what came to be known as fake news and post-truth.
As the various organizations that announced their particular choices for their Words of the Year (WOTY), 2016 had the dubious distinction of being labeled a ‘dumpster-fire’ by the American Dialect Society thereby furthering the concept of fake news. How else could a phrase that was scarcely uttered anywhere in the world in 2016 be chosen for this ‘honor’?
For historical comparisons of a number of the terms used in this analysis, GLM used the Google Ngram Viewer. You can use the Ngram Viewer to chart frequencies of comma-delimited search strings. The Google Ngram Viewer uses yearly counts from sources printed between 1500 and 2008, though in some cases later dates of publications are included.
Figure 1. Relative Frequency of citations among words used to describe the Top Words of the Year for 2016
Figure 2. Close-up on Relative Frequency Among Some Top Words of the Year for 2016
Figure 3. Comparisons for the Words Truth Vs. Lie Since 1740
This is why early in the century, the Global Language Monitor put into place a methodology that clearly states that each considered word or phrase must adhere to the published criteria (see below). The methodology calls for words and phrases from the entire global English linguasphere to be considered, as well as each fulfilling geographic and demographic requirements. This automatically excludes the lists created by those organizations that rely on polls and other such non-scientific tools
A Methodology Optimized for the Wired World -- GLM’s Word of the Year rankings are based upon actual word usage throughout the English-speaking world, which now approaches some 2.38 billion people, who use the language as a first, second, business language. 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 profession or social group or geography. The goal is to find the word usage that will endure the test of time.
Global Language Monitor began to use newly available technologies to document the Words of the Year for Global English at the turn of the 21st century, with the idea to encapsulate and capture the essence of the preceding twelve months in a sort of linguistic amber.
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 1.512.801-6823, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit www.LanguageMonitor.com.
Apocalyptic language has been widely cited as word of the year worthy for the last several years — and rightly so. In fact, Apocalypse and Armageddon took Global Language Monitors’ honors as Top Global English Words of 2012. And though GLM’s proprietary algorithms have displayed a predictive element, it’s entirely possible that Apocalyptic language did indeed peak some three years too soon.
The Top Words, Phrases, and Names since the Turn of the Century
March 28th, 2011
You Don’t Say
This article has been shared from The Daily’s iPad app
Make no mistake — Obama is a big fan of his own catchphrases
BY ANTHONY DECEGLIE AND JENNY MERKINMONDAY, MARCH 28, 2011
Statistics gathered by the Global Language Monitor reveal that Obama has said it 2,924 times since he was sworn into office more than two years ago.
Other signature Obama sayings include Here’s the deal (1,450 times) and Let me be clear, (1,066 times).
In a nod to the tough financial times he has faced, the president’s fifth most popular motto is It will not be easy.
Obamas reheated rhetoric has recently come under fresh scrutiny. Parts of his speech warning Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to honor the United Nations cease-fire pact were strikingly similar to the words spoken by President George W. Bush when he launched military strikes in Afghanistan.
“Our goal is focused. Our cause is just. And our coalition is strong.” Obama said. Bush, nearly a decade earlier, Your mission is defined. Your objectives are clear. Your goal is just.”
Make no mistake, The Daily is hoping Obama lifts his creative game and ‘wins the future’ (another rhetorical crutch) when it comes to this public speaking deal. Although we understand it will not be easy.
Scale of Top Sayings (Source: The Global Language Monitor, as of March 25)
#1 Make no mistake — 2,924 times
#2 Win the future — 1,861 times; (9 times in his 2011 State of the Union address)
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.
These services are currently provided to the Fortune 500, Olympic Partners, leading Higher Education institutions, high-tech firms, the worldwide print and electronic media, the global fashion industry, among others.
Paul JJ Payack lecturing on Big and Ephemeral Data in Shanghai
GLM foresees a time in the near future where data doubles every hour, every minute, then every second.
To address this unfolding reality, GLM created the tools you need to address an enterprise in a world never at rest, where the facts can change before you locked your strategy into place, in the world where the social media of today is but a hint of what will emerge in the coming months and years.
GLM’s specialized products and services have been built from the ground up for Big and bigger date, for a marketplace ever in flux, where the only constant changes.
Ephemera
In 2003, GLM’s founder, Paul JJ Payack, first conceived of a new class of data that he called Ephemera, or Ephemeral Data.
Global Language Monitor’s proprietary algorithms (including the PQI and Narrative Tracker) are used to plum ephemeral data on any topic for any industry worldwide, quickly and accurately. Many organizations have used GLM as an additional input to their already robust analytical solutions. Call 1.512.801.6823 or email info@LanguageMonitor.com
Subprime Meltdown (New York Times)
In 2006, The New York Times worked with the Global Language Monitor to assess the state of the New York City real estate market. GLM’s used its proprietary POI technology, which The Times described as “an algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet in relation to frequency, context, and appearance in the global media.” The study has been hailed as presaging the coming Financial Meltdown, now known as the Great Recession.
The New York Times featuring GLM’s PQI
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GLM’s Founder on BBC America
GLM as a Source of Record
GLM continues to be cited hundreds of by the leading print and electronic media the world over. In fact, the worldwide print and electronic media have come to rely on The Global Language Monitor for its expert analysis on cultural trends and their subsequent impact on various aspects of culture.
Worldwide print and electronic media have come to rely on GLM for it Trend Tracking and analytics-based analyses.
BBC Cites GLM for Words of the Decade
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the BBC used two global experts to choose the words that would sum up the decades, represented English as spoken in the UK, the other English as spoken in America, Australia and the rest of the world.
The Global Language Monitor’s president was chosen for Global English as shown below.
A representative sampling includes: CNN, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Associated Press, United Press International, Knight-Ridder, USAToday, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Charlotte Observer, Minneapolis Star Tribune, San Jose Mercury, New York Post, NPR, FoxNews, ABC, NBC, CBS, ChinaNews, Peoples Daily, The National Post, The Sydney Morning Herald, The BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Company, The Canadian Broadcasting Company, The Cape Town Argus, El Pais (Madrid), The Daily Mail (Scotland), The Hindustan Times, The Gulf News (Qatar), and various electronic and print media on six continents.
About Paul JJ Payack
Paul JJ Payack has served as a senior executive of three Fortune 500 high technology companies (Unisys, Dun & Bradstreet, and StorageTek), and three Silicon Valley technology companies (Apollo Computer, Intelliguard Software, Legato Systems) that were acquired by four other Silicon Valley giants (EMC, Dell, Oracle, and HP), as well as numerous start-ups and re-starts. (For Payack’s Linkedin bio, go here.)
Currently, GLM’s President and Chief Word Analyst, he also was the founding president of yourDictionary.com. These two language sites attract millions of page views a month. He founded GLM in Silicon Valley in 2003 and moved it to Austin, Texas in 2008.
Payack taught scientific and technological communications at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Texas-Arlington and Babson College, the Federal Reserve Bank (NY), GM/Hughes Aircraft, and many others.
He is a frequent guest on the media circuit including CNN, the BBC, NPR, the CBS, Australia Broadcasting Company and Chinese Radio and Television.
Payack is the author of some eighteen collections (seven currently in print), including A Million Words and Counting, Kensington (New York) as well as co-author with Edward ML Peters of The Paid-for Option (Tower Oaks Press), an analysis of the healthcare crisis in the USA. (For a sampling of Payack’s creative work, including metafiction, flash fiction, and collage art, go here.)
Payack studied philosophy and psychology at Bucknell University and was graduated from Harvard where he studied comparative literature, classical languages, and fine arts.
He currently resides in Austin, Texas with his wife, Millie, and family. Contact Payack directly: 001 512 801 6823 or pauljjpayack@gmail.com
Number of Words in the English Language: 1,009,614
Published: March 25th, 2011
This is the estimate by the Global Language Monitor on March 21, 2011.
The English Language passed the Million Word threshold on June 10, 2009, at 10:22 a.m. (GMT). ??The Millionth Word was controversial Web 2.0. Currently, there is a new word created every 98 minutes or about 14.7 words per day.
Google Validates GLM?s No. of Words English Prediction
Source: Jean-Baptise Michel/AAAS/Science
Though GLM’s analysis was the subject of much controversy at the time, the recent Google/Harvard Study of the Current Number of Words in the English Language is 1,022,000.
The above graphic is from the AAAS /Science as reported on NPR. At the time the ??New York Times article on the historic threshold famously quoted several dissenting linguists as claiming that even Google could not come up with such a methodology. Unbeknownst to them, Google was doing precisely that.
The number of words in the English language according to GLM now stands at 1,009,614. The difference between the two analyses is .0121%, which is widely considered statistically insignificant.
Google’s number, which is based on the counting of the words in the 15,000,000 English language books it has scanned into the Google Corpus mirrors GLM’s Analysis. GLM’s number is based upon its algorithmic methodologies, explication of which is available from its site.
ENGLISH AND ITS ODDITIES; The word factory keeps producing
Editorial, March 4 2009
One million. These days, with billions in bailouts and trillions in debts, a million of anything doesn’t seem like all that much.
But a million English words? Hat and cat and poll and prestidigitation?
Sure, the dictionary’s full of words. But a regular Webster’s has only about 200,000 words in it. And the gold standard of English dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary, which comes in volumes, contains only about 600,000. And the average American’s vocabulary? 20,000 words. Ouch
Obviously, the Global Language Monitor knows more than the Oxford folks. That’s the organization contending English will add its one millionth word sometime next month
The group can’t, of course, foretell what that word will be. Maybe it’ll be a kid word, like “janky,” also sometimes spelled “jainky” or “jinky.” (These things are always fluid.) It apparently means anything from “substandard” to “weird” and often relates to other people. “That guy is sure janky!”
Superlatives are often expressed in new-slang: “Wooka,” for instance, is said to be the hottest way to say “Wow!” And “nang” means “absolutely fantastic!”
The Urban Dictionary, an online and hard-bound resource for slang- sensitive people, tries to keep current as the vernacular evolves. This is not easy; it offers a new word each day. “Gank,” it says, means “to steal.” “I didn’t have any money, so I ganked it.”
“Yinz” is the new way to say “y’all,” “you guys” or “you.”
“Janhvi” is a really amazing person who knows how to be a great friend
English has absorbed a variety of computer geekisms: “lol,” meaning “laugh out loud,” and, a kid-related warning, “prw,” meaning, “parents are watching.” And, by the way, “geek” itself is so far “out” of the argot that it has turned up in the dictionary. And it has a possible origin: It might be an alteration of the Low German “gek.” That’s pretty establishment
Of course, most of the words mentioned here have undoubtedly vanished from the patois, never to pass young lips again. As soon as adults become aware of a new slang word, you can bet it’s no longer “in,” “hot,” “with it.”
“Three days of on the solar calendar, the compatriots on the restaurant. A democratic face, brutal head How many pieces. Small cubs are inflated to make the girl free. Not to be made, directly or indirectly also romantic,” “everywhere groups, everyone has the brains. Preservation of the true purpose, thought a good spirit. Hinterland Shing, the center of the deepest. out call ether, where they set policy. ” This is the beginning of the 20th century spread of the two doggerel, as when a large number of modern natural and social sciences new words into our country, causing a lot of sharp criticism and disapproval, this “group, brains, purpose, thought, spirit, principles, compatriots , democracy, expansion, freedom, directly or indirectly “and other things at that time were all quite the proposed” new words. ” Most of these new words imported from Japan, with a reputation for “liberal,” said a senior official Zhang Zhidong, also resented also argued that Ban used a new term known Japan.
But the language has some kind of forced, even to people who oppose change unknowingly use these “new words.” With the “new school” Nikko, to completely get rid of the new term is increasingly unlikely, even hate new words such as Zhang Zhidong, also can not escape. Once he asked his staff to be a running outline of a road, surprise, he intended to see the text after the “health”, they rage, pick up a pen award: “The health is a Japanese term used special feel hateful.” Throw also Zhang’s “handle”, it tit for tat to return, saying: “‘term’ is the Japanese term, The particular use of the hateful.” Duo broke up. Against the use of “Japanese term” persons, such as Zhang Zhidong, but can not get rid of “Japanese term” troubled indeed symbolic.
Do not want to over a hundred years later, the “CCTV” has encountered difficulties Zhang year. Not long ago, SARFT issued a notice to the CCTV, broadcast in the host population, the reporter interviews and subtitles can no longer use, such as NBA, CBA, F1, GDP, WTO, CPI and other foreign language acronym. However, the CCTV their station logo “CCTV” was also the English acronym. If further breakdown, many local television station logo also has a “TV” in English and Abbreviations “TV” words. TV ban foreign language abbreviations, they can not get rid of their foreign language abbreviations station logo, really embarrassing.
Hundred years, Zhang’s plight is almost identical with the embarrassment of CCTV, indicating a common fact or truth: Language has never been in flux, with the exchanges between different civilizations to exchange and accelerate better. In theory, the language of communication should be equal to each other, interact, exchange between different civilizations should be so absorbed with each other “foreign language.” But in fact the language is also very “snobbish,” as water is high to the low-flow, is simply “equal.” History shows that the evolution of language development, “foreign language” was more “advanced” and “center” to “backward”, “marginal” infiltration, invasion, reverse flows are rare, which had deeply affected former. The large number of “foreign language” in the modern with the Western Learning, and even “foreign” to the Home on the situation, Gein “Western” than “secondary” developed advanced also.
Whether happy or not, agree or not, this natural process is so difficult to man-made change, need not be bitter. If only “Cha Hukou” “talk origins” and that it must get to the root search origin, non-ancestors are not the root of red seedlings, must take this with a colonial foreign language all out the door, then we could hardly speak. Not check does not know, investigated surprised, we used some of the basic terminology, vocabulary, mostly been imported from Japan Modern. For example, when we unhesitatingly say “Serve the People”, “strengthen the organizational discipline,” “politics” and “eternal revolution” “application to join the party,” “master policy” and “fundamental policy”, “problem solving”, “learning theory, “” learn philosophy, “” principled “, this service, organization, discipline, political, revolution, party, principles, policies, application, solution, theory, philosophy, principles, etc., all come from the Japanese real “foreign language”, as well as economic, labor, science, business, cadres, logistics, health, socialism, capitalism, feudalism, republicanism, aesthetics, art, abstraction, logic, design … … and countless others all come from the Japanese.
Since the introduction of new concepts of modern China, Japan on the “Western” Translation is far better than China, while a large number of Chinese students studying in Japan, China and Japan “with the text” and many other reasons, so that the books translated from Japanese in Sino-Japanese War China After the defeat of Japan suddenly from behind, quickly exceeding the original books in Spanish translation. Liang to Japan soon after wrote “The benefits of learning Japanese,” the article as “Qing Yi Pao,” the editorial strength of the Japanese should learn from the mentality of the intellectuals of that time reflected. He wrote: “Japan Tour only a few months, wantonly Japan paper, reading the Japanese book, not seen in the membership in former times, successively touch the eyes, in former times the poor are not the reason, cavort in the brain, such as Youshi see the day belly was dry wine, complacent, and not selfish, is crying out to tell me comrade, saying: My new scholars interested person, the Japanese sample also learned from Japan Bunya. “A year later, he recalled that a year’s experience in Japan him, “whom Gaiyi brain quality, thought and speech, and if the former is a two.” Examines the Liang, who in recent years the paper, indeed, a major transformation, not only “Western” understanding by leaps and bounds, and the important terms used are basically from the original Chinese term used almost exclusively to the Japanese terms.
From 1900, the Chinese translation of new knowledge almost concentrated in Japan, and even almost every time a Japanese middle school textbooks have been translated into Chinese, even some teachers have also been translated handouts. It is worth mentioning that now has almost been forgotten Fan Diji translation series “compile general encyclopedia”, was widely distributed, large impact. “Book” includes the “knowledge” in various fields, is divided into eight categories: Religion and Philosophy 6, 1 species of literature, education, 5, 18 kinds of politics and law, science and 28 species of industry (including agriculture, commerce and industry) 22, the other 2. “Book” is the standard used by the Japanese term for the standardization of terminology of various disciplines in China played an important role. But even more interesting, because before the door of modern China in Japan by Western ships and armament to open, so “Western Learning” first while in Japan, so before and after the Meiji Restoration, Japan, China was the understanding of the West “Western” and one window, a number of missionaries in Chinese translation of “Western” a large number of books translated into Japanese publication. During this period many of the “new Japanese words” is from the Chinese, such as railway, railway, news, parliament, rights, sovereignty, law, elections, chemistry, botany, cell, logic … … numerous. However, a comprehensive modern Japan than modern China, “Japanese new word,” including some “native to China” is not as popular in China, new words, it in large quantities, rapidly into China.
It is through the introduction a lot of translation, a large number into the Japanese vocabulary into modern Chinese. These words quickly replaced the earlier works of Yan Fu’s translation of most of the terminology. Such as the strict translation of “Logic”, “Total study” as “logical”, “economy” replaced. Almost all kinds of subjects related to these new terms, or the newly created modern Japan, or Japan, while enabling innovative use of old words, and now borrowed by the vast number of Chinese intellectuals, which greatly enriched the Chinese vocabulary, and promoted many Chinese changes in the modernization movement in China laid the cornerstone of a very important.
But if today some Chinese prefer to use the term “post-colonial discourse,” the scholar’s words, this is really a Chinese, “he who” and even “self-time colonization.” Because they had the Japanese translation of English terms used (ie Japanese is English “colonization”), and now it is already Chinese, “colonization” of the Japanese “colonization” is indeed “self-time colonization.” So “colonial” to the Chinese today, if for the “purity” and that such issues as labor, revolution, party, principles, policies, application, solution theory … … of these “new Japanese word” all clear that we will be unable to speak, really become a serious problem in patients with aphasia. These words, has become an integral part of us. That “other” and “we” is ambiguous, it is transferable. Ancient Japanese borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese “otherness” and the introduction of modern Japanese and anti Chinese were a large number of Japanese “otherness” of, in the two “other” of the process, “the Other” are both organically as ” I “, or even hard to distinguish each other. This is a human and cultural exchanges to promote the development of normal. If you must, such as China, some “post-colonial” scholars strong points, as “he” and “I” which insists that “he” from “I” in get rid of, the result will only hurt his own body.
Cultural exchange, the introduction of new words of course can not leave the translation. Translation community to a free translation, transliteration of the dispute, but the transliteration of free translation might have been the era of globalization can not keep up “needs of the times”, simply Kara OK, B Super, CT, TV, KTV, DV, DVD, CD, VCD, 3G, BBS , MP3, IT, IP, QQ, CEO, CD-MA, ADSL, iPhone, iPad … … until with the “Super Girl” overnight popularity of PK, these “foreign language acronym” direct confusion into the “rain Li, ghosts cry at night” was created among the Chinese characters, as “Modern Chinese” part. True or false? Non-false? To ban this? Can not ban ban and strong, there will be Zhang-style embarrassment. As the final prohibition can not understand, so the authority of the “Modern Chinese Dictionary” long face reality, dedicated “the beginning of the Western alphabet, the words”; but is this part of the modern Chinese language, making it more thick.
In fact, there are “strong world language” of the so-called English, other languages are also suffering from the serious “pollution.” February 5, 2006’s “The Times” has issued a document evaluation of “Chinglish” (Chinglish) the impact, according to Texas-based “Global Language Monitor” (Global Language Monitor) released the report, English is experiencing unprecedented in the history of the changes, the first one million English words appear in this summer. Moreover, since 1994, joined the ranks of the vocabulary of international English, Chinese English contributed perhaps … more than any other source. “Surprisingly, due to the impact of China’s economic growth, it is now the impact of international English bigger than the English-speaking countries”, the agency head, a graduate of Harvard University linguist Paul Luopayake (PaulPayack) said, French foreign language in the 19th century, and then gradually decline in the 20th century, said to his words now only 10 million. The “Global English is no longer a British English or American English language dominance, but in unrestricted and with regional characteristics in the form of development.” Chinese English and as many as 60 similar to the English word, such as Spanish English (Spanglish), Japanese English (Japlish) and Indian English (Hinglish), have become very popular with the Internet. Payack that English has to win now, because it is eclectic, and the French are more conservative in its pure degree of specification by the French Academy. Results from 1997 to 2002, the European Union in French fell by 24% of the documents, documents in English increased by 32%. Perhaps, this is the “Times” to “pollution” standard English “Chinglish” to be tolerant, positive attitude toward the Yuan Yin, Taren Wei Chinese English enriched the English Biaodanengli Suoyi You positive impact. Language and ideology, culture, just as “tolerance is a virtue.”
Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges in modern Japan from the “new word” of “importing country” leap of “sending” an important reason is that the “new school” in Japan is much smaller than China encountered resistance. This “student position” history shows that, if closed to maintain a conservative cultural traditions, motives can be described as care and thought, but the result is not only no help in the matter, but more passive, “national culture” and so is even more impossible to talk about onwards. English and French in the competition far behind the French also illustrates the fact that only an open culture to gain the initiative, to really promote the national culture. I am afraid I repeat, do not reform and opening up to China’s national strength is greatly increased only after the world today, “Chinese fever” it? Which shows that the Chinese “soft power” of “Chinglish”, thus not only became English in a small landscape it?
Lei Yi
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher at Institute of Modern History leiyi5684@vip.sina.com
Study also compares Michelle Obama with the Royals
NarrativeTracker analysis of Internet, social and traditional media
AUSTIN, Texas. April 18, 2011. With less than two weeks left before the Royal Wedding on April 29th, Kate Middleton is already posting Diana-type numbers in terms of news worthiness and celebrity status on the Top Global Media sites as well as on the Internet and Social Media according to The Global Language Monitor. Previously GLM had found the soon-to-be Princess Catherine the Top Fashion Buzzword of the 2011 season, replacing the eccentric Lady Gaga.
The GLM study compared the citations of Kate Middleton with those of Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, Prince William, Prince Harry, and Camilla Parker Bowles. Michelle Obama as First Lady of the United States was included as a relevant American comparison. For the Top Global Media, the citations were measured over the last three months as well as all the archives available.
???Kate Middleton is set to eclipse Princess Di as the media star of the Royal Family,??? said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor. ???In fact, Kate could surpass all Internet, Social Media, and Global Print and Electronic Media citations by the time the Royal Wedding-related stories are compiled.???
Two weeks before the Royal Wedding, Middletons Internet and Social Media citations, surpass all members of the Royal Family. Prince William comes in as a close second followed by Princess Diana, who died in a Paris car crash in 1997.
For Internet news citations, Middleton follows only Prince William and Prince Charles. For comparison, First Lady Michelle Obama, since she first came to notice in 2004, would rank No. 3 in Internet and Social Media citations, just ahead of Princess Diana and would rank No 4, again slightly ahead of Princess Diana in Internet news.
In the traditional Global Print and Electronic Media, Prince William and his bride-to-be, both double references to Queen Elizabeth and quadruple those to Prince Charles who would also follow Michelle Obama.
Note: Princess Di is cited in hundred of thousands of news stories even though she died before Google, social media, and smartphones existed. Even without the current media environment where the Internet, social media, and the traditional media feed upon themselves as some sort cyber echo chamber, the study demonstrates the enduring legacy of Princess some fourteen years after her death.
GLM used NarrativeTracker Technology in this study.
NarrativeTracker is based on the global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture of what any audience is saying about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, the top global print, and electronic media, as well as new social media sources (such as Twitter).
Media for detailed statistics, call 001.512.801.6823 or email GLM.
Tags: Camilla Parker Bowles, Fashion, First Lady, Kate Middleton, Michelle Obama, NarrativeTracker, Prince Harry, Prince William, Princess Di, Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth, Royal Wedding, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter
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Top Trending Words and Phrases of 2016: Bigly, Brexit & Non-binary
UPDATE: March 23 2017 (Originally 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.
“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 1.512.801-6823, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit www.LanguageMonitor.com.
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, March 3, 2017 (Update) — 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 through 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.
The world’s dominant language is nearing the million mark, but should they all count?
Edmonton Journal
STEVENSON SWANSON NEW YORK
MCT ILLUSTRATION BANK, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Are you a locavore who decries the tapafication of restaurants or a latte liberal on the fence about Billary?
No matter, the explosion of new words in the English language is enough to make you want to bury your head under a blankie or run off to Godzone.
English always has been something of a mongrel language, but thanks to e-mail and the Internet, the spread of English around the world, and a playful response to changing times, new words and phrases are cropping up so quickly that one language watcher calculates that English is bearing down on a milestone — its one-millionth word.
“English is like an open language that absorbs every type of word from all different languages,” said Paul Payack, who runs Global Language Monitor, a website and language consulting business. “English is a people’s language. It grows from the ground up.”
Payack, whose web-based word-watching started in 1999 with the site YourDictionary.com, figures there are about 995,000 words in the English language. Sometime this year, he forecasts, the mother tongue of Shakespeare will tip over the seven-figure mark.
By contrast, Payack says, Spanish has about 275,000 words, and French only about 100,000.
Using a series of mathematical formulas, Payack tracks new words as they crop up in databases of printed materials, such as major newspapers and magazines, and on the Internet.
If the number of citations reaches what Payack considers a critical mass, he adds the word to his master lexicon, which he compiled by assembling the word lists of about a dozen major English dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s unabridged dictionary.
Among his recent additions are “bagonize,” to describe the agonizing feeling of waiting for your luggage at an airport baggage carousel, and “smirting,” the combination of smoking and flirting that takes place in doorways in an era when indoor smoking is increasingly taboo.
But not every would-be word makes the cut. He recently tested “nakation,” a vacation where clothing is optional. Google turned up 34 references. “That would not make it as a word,” he said. Scholars and dictionary editors cast doubt on Payack’s methods and say that an accurate word count is impossible. But they agree that English has word-spinning built into its DNA.
The language has Germanic origins, but French was grafted onto it when the French-speaking Normans conquered England in 1066. During the Renaissance, Latin words became the vogue, and as the British empire spread around the globe, its colonies contributed their own distinctive flavours to the language of the rulers.
“More than half of our vocabulary is from other cultures,” said Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, which chose “subprime” as the 2007 word of the year. “So we are used to words from a lot of languages, and we’re used to a lot of new words coming in.”
It also helps that English, reflecting the free-market leanings of England and America, has no official gatekeeper, such as the Academie francaise, which keeps French officially pure of foreign — and especially Anglo-American — influences.
But Payack believes the creation of new words has sped up in recent decades in part because of the rapid growth in the number of people who speak English as either a first or second language. He puts the number at 1.35 billion.
And non-native speakers are every bit as likely to coin new words and phrases as native speakers.
“Studies show that when kids learn English in Singapore, they think they own the language,” said the San Diego-based Payack. “They take it, they twist it.”
That has given rise to the phenomenon of “Chinglish,” a Chinese-English hybrid that yields such coinages as “no noising” for “quiet, please,” and “airline pulp” for “airline food.”
Chief among the skeptics who dismiss the countdown to the millionth word is Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large for the Oxford English Dictionary, which is widely regarded as the most authoritative compilation of English words.
“I think it’s nonsense,” he said. “People don’t agree on what a word is.”
The Global Language Monitor, he continued, is “counting something very exactly that simply cannot be counted very exactly.”
Are all forms of the verb “run” counted as separate words? What about numbers?
“If you were to count every number between zero and 999,999 as a word, you’d have a cool million right there,” he wrote in an article on Slate last year.
Payack counters that he counts only “head words,” or the main forms of a word. “Run” is in, “ran” is an also-ran.
“We count the number of stars, we count the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, we count how many people there are,” said Payack, who also uses his proprietary mathematical formulas to advise businesses on such things as new product names.
“A thought spoken: That’s the old English definition of a word.”
Comparison of 90-days since the 2008 Presidential Election
to 9/11 and Start of Iraq War
Austin, TX February 10, 2009 – The Global Language Monitor has found that words of despair and fear relating to the global economic meltdown are drowning out those of hope in the global media in the ninety days since the US presidential election on November 4, 2008.
With thousands of global headlines centering on the deteriorating global economy followed by news of the human toll of people driven to despair and committing acts of desperation, GLM undertook an analysis of the language used in the global print and electronic media since the US presidential election. GLM then compared their frequency of use to the ninety days following the 9/11 Terrorists attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 and the 90-day period following the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003. The representative fear-related words chosen: Fear, Despair, Abandoned, Desperate/Desperation.
The analysis found that these words were used in the last ninety days with 18-23% more frequency since the historic Obama election than when 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. The one exception was that of the word fear, itself, though its use in relation to the economic meltdown was still some 85% of its use in the case of 9/11 and the Iraq War.
“The results are striking, especially, in contrast to the immense outpouring of global goodwill in response to the inauguration of Barack Omama, since the survey included the ten days immediately following Obama’s swearing in,” ” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor.
The specific breakdown of the keywords (and related variations) follows:
1. Abandoned — Abandoned appeared some 23% more frequently
2. Despair — Despair appeared some 18% more frequently
3. Desperation – Desperation appeared some 18% more frequently
