The Word of the Year for 2013

You may have heard that the venerable Oxford Dictionaries has announced its Word of the Year for 2013: the noun selfie, defined as "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam, and uploaded to a social media website."

Here is a great selfie I found online ...

There were a few runners-up for the Word of the Year crown. Some of them (with my comments) were:

binge-watch (verb) : to watch multiple episodes of a television program in rapid succession, typically by means of DVDs or digital streaming. I've done this with Lost and am doing it with the first season of Game of Thrones.

bitcoin (noun): a digital currency in which transactions can be performed without the need for a central bank. Also, a unit of bitcoin. I have enough trouble earning real money, without worrying about imaginary money.

olinguito (noun): a small furry mammal found in mountain forests in Colombia and Ecuador, the smallest member of the raccoon family. When I first saw the word, I thought it referred to a type of oral sex performed by midgets. Sorry.

schmeat (noun): a form of meat produced synthetically from biological tissue. I can just see Charlton Heston screaming, "Soylent Green is made out of SCHMEAT!!"

showrooming (noun): the practice of visiting a shop or shops in order to examine a product before buying it online at a lower price. This is what we used to call comparison shopping, just with the digital twist.

And finally we have the word I'd have picked as the word of the year had it been my decision -

twerk (verb): to dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance. Thank you, Miley Cyrus. I was going to include a link to the infamous video clip, but there might be children reading this, and Mike tends to be impressionable. Just Google Miley Cyrus twerk and watch from between your fingers. So to speak.

Are there any new words from the past year that caught your attention? Leave a comment. We can always stand to expand our vocabularies.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo