Merriam Webster's list of the top ten most looked-up words in 2004 has "blog" as the number one Word of the Year. Congratulations, bloggers.
The dangerous thing that many people haven't talked about yet is that "defenestration" is sitting at the bottom of the list and most of the words in between relate either to the election or to natural disasters. I'm not big into defenestration, but if I was (and remember, I'm not), I'd be looking at 2005 as a prime opportunity to dethrone "blog".
What would it really take? The election is over (almost). Next year probably won't have as many hurricanes or cicadas. All they have to do is defenestrate a few more people here and there and 2005's Word of the Year will be defenestration.
Look out.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance
Comments (3)
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Andy 2046 days ago
One thing to consider, is the source. Webster is using the online searches at their site (I'll presume), as the primary method for identifying the word of the year. That being the case, it's pretty obvious why "blog" is up there. Blogging is, after all, the new heart and soul of the internet. Looking at the current phase of its development, it's not going anywhere.
But like I said, that's obvious. Some of the other words, are far more interesteing, and not so obvious...Like defenestration.
I'd pose the question, WHY on earth is "a person or thing out of a window" on the list? Who is searching for THAT?
Brian's eluding to Windows 2005...perhaps the next big OS? If so, could this be a marketing ploy? Maybe Microsoft has an entire department of 10 employees, and their whole purpose of existence, is to click-search the Webster website for Defenestration..
Not likely. I'm at a loss.
John 2096 days ago
So if I start a blog called "Defenestration", would that help more people to look it up???
Acquisti 2057 days ago
Very interesting. I think that "blog" will be hard to get out of the way. Google has caused this "natural disaster" through its crawling techniques and nobody seems willing to "clean up". Everyone's just trying to climb up highest in rankings (obviously), and as long as Gbot scans that way then "blog" will keep its throne!