My Word

It's that time of year again.  Time for dictionaries to get free publicity by declaring a word of the year, or a selection of words that will be added to their books.  I was going to rant about these choices, but it seems I've done that before.  More than once.  But the fact is, sometimes these words aren't really deserving of their accolades; I'm still waiting to hear anyone use the word "infosnacking" after it was declared 2005 word of the year by Webster's New World College Dictionary.

So I have a proposition.  This is for any dictionaries or linguistic societies out there that have put off finding a word of the year for 2014, and are now scrambling to find a new word they can use to get those cheap mentions from the world's news providers. A few weeks ago, I used the word "Googlespace" to describe the proportion of relevant results a word or phrase gets.  For instance, if I Google "jaguar", most of the results are for the car company, rather than the cat or the football team.  So the company occupies more "Googlespace" than the other uses of the word.
You'll note that I used the word without explanation, as though I'm assuming that my hip, fashionable readers on the bleeding-edge of technology would already know what it means, so you can reasonably claim that the word is already used and about to hit the mainstream.

I assure you that my royalty demands will be reasonable.  But if you don't want to use my word, you can always make up a word for a manufactured news item used to get free publicity.