A12 NOVEMBER 25-DECEMBER 1, 2009 NATIONAL NEW PITTSBURGH COURIER
No rebuke for ‘admonish,’ 2009 Word of the Year
by Bob Salsberg
The society plans to name the former Alaska governor son” to a “horse inclined to
its Word of the Year, along prepared to release her shirk or misbehave.”
Associated Press Writer
with a Word of the Decade, book, titled “Going Rogue.” However, the definition
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. in January, Metcalf said. The sense in which the for the adjective form of
(AP)—When the U.S. The word “rogue” made word was used to describe rogue does appear to fit
House admonished Rep. Merriam-Webster’s 2008 Palin does not, in fact, cor- Palin, right down to the
Joe Wilson for shouting list after Palin, the Repub- respond to any of the five elephant that’s a symbol of
“You lie!” at President lican vice presidential can- definitions for the noun the GOP: “resembling or
Barack Obama during a didate, was said to have rogue in the Merriam-Web- suggesting a rogue ele-
health care speech to “gone rogue” from the John ster collegiate dictionary, phant especially in being
Congress, it not only lit up McCain campaign. It which range from a “dis- isolated, aberrant, danger-
talk show lines, but also resurfaced this year when honest or worthless per- ous or uncontrollable.”
REP. JOE WILSON MICHAEL JACKSON
sent many people scurry-
ing to the Internet in
search of a definition.
Admonish, a verb dating
to the 14th century mean-
ing “to express warning or
disapproval in a gentle,
earnest, or solicitous man-
ner,” generated enough cu-
riosity to crown it Mer-
riam-Webster’s Word of the
Year for 2009.
It beat out several other
finalists that emerged from
what the dictionary pub-
lisher’s editor at large,
Peter Sokolowski, called the
“intersection of news and
vocabulary.” Runners-up
announced Nov. 19 included
inaugurate, pandemic, fur-
lough and rogue—the latter
tied to Sarah Palin and the
sole carryover from the
2008 list.
Virtually all the words
were associated with a
news event or coverage
and resulted in a prolonged
spike of look-ups on the
dictionary offered online
for free by Merriam-Web-
ster, based in Springfield,
Mass.” Words that make
up this list are words that
jumped and stayed up
there,” Sokolowski said.
“Even if the word was no
longer on the front page of
the newspaper, it was still
something that people
were blogging about or
reading about online.”
“Admonish” shot to the
top in part because it was
used at several stages of
the story—originally to de-
scribe the reaction to Wil-
son’s outburst, then to the
editorial reaction, and fi-
nally to the official House
resolution admonishing the
South Carolina Republi-
can.
Dictionary users may
have been seeking to dis-
tinguish shades of meaning
from synonyms such as
“scold” or “rebuke,” Soko-
lowski said. Those terms
suggest a harsher tone,
while “admonish” suggests
a decidedly more genteel
response.
Another word on Mer-
riam-Webster’s 2009 Top
10 list, “emaciated,” gener-
ated a flurry of interest
after it was used to de-
scribe the condition of
Michael Jackson’s body
after the entertainer’s
death in June. It was the
most looked-up word of the
summer, Sokolowski said.
Only one of the year’s top
words had no clear peg to
current events. It was “nu-
gatory,” an adjective mean-
ing “of little or no conse-
quence.” Sokolowski said
that while it was a favorite
word of his, he remains
puzzled as to why it cre-
ated a buzz of sudden dic-
tionary interest.
The Wall Street financial
crisis gave rise to “bailout,”
the 2008 Word of the Year.
In the two previous years,
Merriam-Webster used on-
line polls or surveys, pro-
ducing “w00t” (an exclama-
tion used by online
gamers) in 2007 and
“truthiness” (a term coined
by political satirist
Stephen Colbert) in 2006.
Other dictionary makers
and groups also announce
Words of the Year, using
different methodology. The
New Oxford American Dic-
tionary chose “unfriend,”
the act of removing some-
one as a friend on Face-
book or other social net-
working site.
Oxford uses a committee
of lexicographers and other
experts to select a word
that is not currently in the
dictionary but will be
added. Merriam-Webster,
on the other hand, selects
among existing entries
based on website traffic.
“It gives a certain amount
of insight into the preoccu-
pations of the past year,”
said Allan Metcalf, an En-
glish professor at MacMur-
ray College in Jacksonville,
Ill., and executive secre-
tary of the American Di-
alect Society, who com-
pared the selection of a
Word of the Year to Time
Magazine’s Person of the
Year.
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