Popular Words
Another year has come and gone and the data hounds over at Google have collected the annual Google Zeitgeist, a listing of what people were searching for in 2003. It comes as no surprise that the list is topped by the navel seen round the world, Britney Spears:
1. britney spears
2. harry potter
3. matrix
4. shakira
5. david beckham
6. 50 cent
7. iraq
8. lord of the rings
9. kobe bryant
10. tour de france
Other categories on interest include Popular Fictional Characters (no WMD?), Popular Brands (couldn't Britney fit in here too?) and the most popular searches from countries such as Canada (topped by an animated fish movie and a exhibitionist celebutante). What can we glean from this information? Who's to say.
Overpopular Words
At the end of every year the good folks up at Lake Superior State University make headlines when they announce their banished words list. Basically they cite all the crap words our mediascape has beaten to death over the past year and ask that those words cease being used.
To submit a word for Banished Words 2005, head over to the Lake Superior State University website. As of now, my list looks like this:
"The moment a word or phrase begins to rise in public value, a variety of interest groups seek either to destroy its reputation or more often, to co-opt it. In this latter case, they don't necessarily adopt the meaning of the word or phrase. They simply want control of it in order to apply a different meaning that suits their own purposes.Posted by James Sherrett at February 11, 2004 04:40 PMWords thus are not free. They have a value. More than any commercial product they are subject to the violent competition of the emotional, intellectual and political market-place."
— John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion, 1994