Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: For the second year in a row, the American Dialect Society made its Word of the Year selection for 2021 in a virtual setting, as the annual conference was once again moved online due to Covid concerns.When the deliberations were held on January 7, 2022, via Zoom, more than three hundred attendees took part in the discussion and voting, with many more viewing the live stream (which has been archived on the American Dialect Society's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0HCWw4hGY).Not surprisingly, coronavirus-related terms often dominated the discussion, much as in 2020 when the overall Word of the Year choice was Covid.As in 2020, a special Pandemic-Related Word of the Year category was added (along with the additional special category of Financial/Economic Word of the Year).In the lead-up to the voting session, nominations were fielded from the public via the online registration form, as well as via Twitter and the American Dialect Society's email address.As data czar for the ADS New Words Committee, Kelly Wright collated the responses, consisting of more than two hundred distinct lexical items.Based on the nominated words, it appeared that the early front-runners were Covid-related: variant and vax(x) ed, with 15 and 13 nominations, respectively.Boosted and omicron were also frequently nominated by the public.But after deliberating on the Zoom session, the WOTY voters opted for a more political choice as the overall winner: insurrection (which had followed variant and vax(x)ed with 12 nominations from the public).More than a year after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the selection of insurrection demonstrated that Americans are still coming to grips with what happened that day.At the time, words like coup, sedition, and riot were used to describe the disturbing events at the Capitol, but insurrection-a term for a violent attempt to take control of the government-is the one that many felt best encapsulated the threat to democracy experienced that day, with its lasting effects reverberating for years to come.
Source: American Speech
Institutions: University of Michigan, Duke University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4285504000