Some people tried to get cute this year when talking about the economy, but many of the popularized words and phrases were easily polarizing. When the New Oxford American Dictionary named hypermiling the word of the year, I think a lot of us were confused by the choice. We are trying to determine the Best of 2008, so I'm wondering, what would you have named the word (or phrase) of the year if you were in charge?
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What's the Best Word of 2008?
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Vanessa Bruno
Topless meeting? Come again?
1I kinda like "staycation" personally. WTF is a topless meeting??
2Topless meeting is a meeting with laptops and any other electronic gadgets.
3They all annoy the crap out of me, especially "staycation". I don't mind the concept, but I hate the word itself.
4I like Recessionista best.
5I like Staycation. My husband and I "took" one this year.
6None of the above. For me, for 2008, the catch word is "bailout."
7I don't like any of these! Especially to describe 2008!
Here's some other options I like instead:
1. "Crackberry"(!!!)
2. "Philanthrocaptialism"
3. "Heteroflexible"
4. "Renoviction"
5. "Returnment"
6. "Clusterf*ck"
7. "Transliteracy"
[I also think it's funny how "wardrobe malfunction" has become a mainstay word.]
8Is it bad that I would love to live in an era when the english language wasn't full of crap?...
Not that I don't think any of these 'words' are funny, I just think it ridiculous that we digress.
9julieulie - A topless meeting is a meeting in which the participants are barred from using their laptops, BlackBerries, or cellphones.
10margokhal, the problem with those words to describe 2008 is that they have been around for a while.
11I've hardly heard of any of those.
12I think the word for 2008 is fail, used as a noun not as a verb, and often preceded by "epic." What makes it annoying is that you really should be saying "failure" instead of "fail" as the noun form.
13LoveSarah, I'm not sure that the contest is specifically for "new" words, as in created/coined this year. Most words & phrases that we have now have been in existence for some time, they've just gained more prevalence recently. The contest is for the Word of the Year 2008, not the NEW Word of the Year 2008. Again, hardly any words can be considered truly new, even the ones Savvy gave as the runner-ups in the contest.
And personally, I've never heard of or used pretty much any of these words until this year or possibly late last year when the election started gearing up ("frugalista" I've read about, but thought it was silly, so I never used it)...and when I explained these words to my family, friends, and their associates, by and large nobody knows what they are (at least not around here, but I'm in a fairly diverse area, so this still doesn't make sense).
I still think they were better options than what was chosen, that's all I'm sayin'.
14I like staycation seeing that that's what my husband and I just did this past weekend and it was great!
15Toxic debt -- it's high time people start calling a spade a spade!
16I'm a fan of "metrognome"-- hot guys who grow their beards out in winter. I think it was coined on Jezebel.com.
17i like the staycation thought the most. that's a word that makes sense to me - seeing as how we all want to go somewhere yet none of us can afford to.
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