The Buzzwords of 2008

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The Buzzwords of 2008

By MARK LEIBOVICH and GRANT BARRETT


WASHINGTON — Politics without buzzwords is like sports without clichés, math without numbers or Blago without bleeps. Tough to imagine, in other words, especially in such a game-changer of a campaign year in which buzzwords were flying like shoes.

Buzzwords are what political wiseguys use to sound all important and knowing in a profession whose prime currency is the illusion of being both. They are like secret passwords for the chattering class, the verbal equivalent of a terrorist fist jab.

Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen. The fundamentals were so dizzyingly strong, it could be tough to keep them all straight. Before you knew it “The One” had become “That One” and the “team of mavericks” were going rogue on each other. You mixed up Client 9 and Candidate 5 at the holiday party and tried to change the subject.

The lifespan of Hillary Clinton’s campaign “meta-narrative” could be charted entirely in buzzwords and catch-phrases — “inevitability” to “Clinton fatigue” to “Obamamania” to “he can’t win” to “team of rivals.”

Same with Sarah Palin — the “hockey mom” who “Geritoled” (or Viagra’d) John McCain’s campaign back to life and threatened to supplant Mrs. Clinton as the new face of American “femocracy.” That is, until she started palling around with Katie Couric and her Joe Six-Pack bona fides got lost in the aisles of Nordstrom and a string of off-message headlines. Ms. Palin was ultimately dubbed a “whack job” by a (rogue) McCainiac, and many have dismissed her efforts at image rehab as akin to putting lipstick on something or other, we forgot.

If political buzzwords in 2008 had a temperament, they would be erratic.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/weekinreview/buzzwords2008.html

Grant Barrett is a lexicographer specializing in slang and new words. He is a co-host of the public radio program “A Way With Words” and head of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. Here are some of the words he tracked this year.

Fail

Largely used online, this is a verb turned into a mass noun, as in “A bucket of fail.” Common forms include epic fail, meaning a huge overall tendency toward failure or a great example of failure, and FAIL! as an interjection or derogation. Often an antonym of win, seen online in forms like “Full of win!” which means, “It’s good!”

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/weekinreview/buzzwords2008.html