Recently I read an article in the New York Times titled All We Are Saying about their selections for the buzzwords that are the "tattoos, scars and medals" differentiating 2007 from other years. Being a NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle addict from way back, the article prompted me to search for additional interesting information and websites about buzzwords and words in general. So this blog will tell you a bit about my current fixation.

First of all, what exactly is a buzzword? According to MerriamWebster.com, the word "buzzword" was coined iin 1946 and is "an important-sounding usually technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen or "a voguish word or phrase —called also buzz phrase". Synonyms for buzzword include fuzzword, jargon, lingo, mediaspeak, catch phrase and phraseology. Anatoly Liberman has written an interesting article The Origins of Buzzwords. Here are some example of defining 2007 buzzwords from the above NY Times article:

bacn - Impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive such as alerts, newsletters and automated reminders.

drama-price - to lower the price of a house to attract the attention of buyers.

e-mail bankruptcy - what you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in processing them. This often includes sending a boilerplate message explaining that old messages will never receive a personal, specific response. Popularized by the Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig.

global weirding - an increase in severe or unusual environmental activity often attributed to global warming. This includes freakish weather and new animal migration patterns.

mom job - also termed a mommy makeover, a package of cosmetic surgery procedures that will reduce such visible effects of childbirth as stretch marks or sagging.

multi-dad - said of a woman who has children by more than one man, first popularized in Britain.

Do you have any suggestions yet for 2008 buzzwords? A Sans Francisco Chronicle editorial Buzzword 2008: 'Change' is the theme of the season suggests the word "change". According to the editorial, the " beauty of 'change' as a political buzzword is its malleability". To Barak Obama , it is a synonym for hope; Hillary Clinton, "rushing to tap its power", uses it as a synonym for preparation for action; John Edwards invokes it for his populist ideals. On the Republican side, John McCain uses change as a code-word for principle. The editorial concludes that "change is entirely up to the candidate to describe and voters to interpret". Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of strategic services for Nielsen Online includes moptimization - as in to clean up (the increasingly common brand practice of attempting to clean up negative search results against general or specific brand-related queries) and wombagging - protecting your brand from negative or undesirable word of mouth (WOM) in his blog The Official 2008 Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast.

Another website that I noticed was the Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007. Merriam-Webster selected the word w00t. "W00t" is an interjection "expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word 'yay'". The word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums and is part of what is known as l33t ("leet," or "elite") speak—a computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are combined to look like letters. Although the double "o" in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for "we owned the other team", again stemming from the gaming community. Merriam-Webster rounds out its Top 10 List with facebook, conundrum, quixotic, blamestorm, sardoodledom, apathetic, Pecksniffian, hypocrite and charlatan. You probably will notice the majority of these words are not unique at all.

Business Buzzword Bingo! is a fun game that can be played at business meetings but can be adapted to any situation of your choice. You may have seen IBM poking fun at itself in a commercial about its employees playing buzzword bingo at a meeting. Some other fun websites about words are Word Use 7.5 Euphemisms, WordSpy, WordGames, WordPlays and Wordie.

IIf you are interested in playing some word games, here are some items that we have at our library:

Word wars [videorecording] : tiles and tribulations on the Scrabble game circuit / Discovery Times and Seventh Art Releasing present an E-Wolf production ; produced by Eric Chaikin ; directed by Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo.

The Oxford guide to word games by Tony Augarde.

The play of words : fun & games for language lovers by Richard Lederer.

Get thee to a punnery by Richard Lederer

An Almanac of words at play compiled by Willard R. Espy.

Another almanac of words at play compiled by Willard R. Espy.

The joy of lex : how to have fun with 860,341,500 words by Gyles Brandreth

More games for the superintelligent by James F. Fixx.