Friday, 27 November 2020

what's the english 'word of the year' for 2020?

 Susie Dent is a lexicographer:

Lexicography - Wikipedia

And she has quite a following:

Susie Dent (@susie_dent) / Twitter

She appears on TV: 

Susie Dent - Countdown 27/08/2020 - HD - YouTube

And she has a regular newspaper column:

Susie Dent | Latest news, analysis, and comment from the i paper

This is her latest piece: on what should be the 'new word of the year':

Covid-19, BLM, anthropause — Oxford Dictionaries is right that there could be no single word of the year

Language is one of the most powerful mirrors of our preoccupations you can find

By the end of April, the Word of 2020 looked to be a slam-dunk already. “Unprecedented” had become the adjective that none of us could avoid, nor ever seem to find a suitable synonym for. Game over, surely?

And yet it would also describe Oxford Dictionaries’ final choice for its ever-anticipated Word of the Year, announced today, because, for the first time, they have found it impossible to choose one. 

Like us, language has had to deal with a barrage of new realities in 2020, and to adapt not just once, but repeatedly. And so Oxford concluded that this year, uniquely, the scope and the scale of change couldn’t possibly be encapsulated in a single term. Instead they have presented an array of words whose usage graphs have spiked in 2020. From “conspiracy theory” to “anthropause”, the result is not a snapshot, but a linguistic panorama.

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Covid-19, BLM, anthropause — Oxford Dictionaries is right that there could be no single word of the year

Here's the Oxford Dictionary's own website:

Oxford Word of the Year 2020 | Oxford Languages

Word of the Year | Oxford Languages

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