Friday, December 14, 2007

Locavores, in the wild!

The little w00t thing in the last post was kind of a throw-away, but I was poking at a real issue … Many of us now actually are referring to "word of the year competition season" when we say "happy holidays".

As the WotY industry has grown, it's changed. At the American Dialect Society, folks are careful (well, sorta) to sort out categories like 'most useful', while the popular press and lexicographers are all over the map with it. W00t is good since it's actually used a lot.

Locavore, by contrast, is cute and captures something good happening culturally, but it was not exactly in wide use when the competition started, certainly not in my circles. I doubt I'd ever seen it printed on paper before then, for example, though it's got a pretty good web presence. So, I was pleased to see that the NYT's op-ed page today has two articles that use the term for real, here and here, after it came up a few days ago on the paper here.

OK, back to mulling over the catastrophe of the steroid scandal ... and don't get me started on the topic of Krugman's column, just too depressing.

Image from here. And I'm not even trying to figure out what it means. It can't be good.

1 comment:

The Ridger, FCD said...

Of course, around here we were saying "Jeeze, how bad would Baltimore have been if they hadn't used?"