Word ruckuses

If you’re a word nerd – and you probably aren’t because you’re a healthy, well-adjusted person who in most years has a rich and fulfilling social life – then you’ll know all about the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year, or one of many copycat WOTY lists from dictionaries and other relevant lexical authorities.

Most of the time, us lingo lovers, suppliants of syntax, and patois proponents are alone in breaking out in a cold sweat, feverish over terminological or morphological matters.

But once in a while, a word will be added to the dictionary – remember when selfie became “official”? – or a WOTY list will spark hot debate. And suddenly people actually care about words.

That is, for those who aren’t already embroiled in the bitter fight to defend the Oxford comma, which is necessary and I will get into a tearoom fight with you over this. Scone plates will fly, cups of Earl Grey will topple. And as thesauri, dictionaries, and grade-school primers from 1932 are launched into the air, the fervent hiss of tea kettles betrays the climbing tension.

Unimaginative imagery worthy of Dickens’ most maudlin. There’s probably some dirt-stained orphan in the corner, horrified at your lack of respect for clarifying punctuation.

Anyway, Merriam Webster has opted for a list of most searched-for words of last year. Their top word is unlikely to cause any further controversy – well, any more than the thing it names already has.

The word pandemic itself is used with such regularity that it’s almost starting to lose meaning. Six months from now it will be a verbal tic, a speech filler. Teachers and grandparents alike will admonish the youth for stammering “like,” “um,” “well,” and “pandemic” when gathering their thoughts.

Several on Merriam Webster’s tabulation of 12 most searched words of yesteryear are no surprise. Pandemic, coronavirus, quarantine, and asymptomatic are probably more surprising for the fact that there was a time people actually had to look them up – and that time was less than a year ago somehow.

The wild card is probably kraken, which spiked in searches the day Seattle’s hockey team announced it as a team name. And you thought there was no sports news last year.

But word nerds, please put down your coffee cups, swallow, and sit down before reading this, but another top search was irregardless (a.k.a., the wrong way to spell and pronounce regardless). Try to be strong, and please, take the fighting outside. We’re down to one last tea set.

There was one inclusion in last year’s list which truly looks ahead to this year: malarkey. We surely have President Biden to thank for that. Regardless (notice I didn’t say “irregardless”?) of how eager you are to hear the new president’s personal diction in the coming months, we can all get excited about ‘malarkey.’

First of all, the fact that we have all been neglecting our use of malarkey is malarkey. It’s too fun to avoid saying.

Also – because who doesn’t get excited about etymology? – you’ll surely be happy to note it’s an all-American word. Probably, anyway.

According to Merriam-Webster, usage of the term was first recorded in our fair country, back in the last ‘20s. Its centenarian status only adds to its appropriate (and seemingly quite frequent) inclusion in Biden’s personal lexicon.

Best of all, since I know we all erase the fantasy football boards to pencil in our bets for the current year’s word list, we all basically get a freebie. The former vice president’s favorite word has been commented on since the last time he worked in the big white building, so odds are good we’ll get reacquainted with the term fast.

And that’s no malarkey.