No Playful Chads to Lighten Up the Year

Their previous top words list has Sept. 10 written all over it. Most Outrageous was "wall thumping," for rubbing your thigh against a security scanner so you don't have to pull an entry card from a pocket. Runner up for Most Euphemistic was "Supreme Court justice," a slap at the tangled process of deciding the 2000 U.S. presidential election. And, for Word of the Year, there was "chad," along with, presumably, its comic couplings with "swinging," "dimpled" and "pregnant."

Each January since 1990, linguists and other academics of the American Dialect Society have voted on the words or phrases that rock their world, which otherwise is devoted to the study of "Devoiced Obstruents in Pennsylvania Dutchified English" and other such matters.

The choices, in about seven categories, typically reflect a celebration of the English language, its capacity for reinvention, innovation, playfulness. This year, though, the list of winners is expect to characterize a year in which Americans struggled for words that weren't there, in which our expanded lexicon denoted an unfamiliar fear with terms such as "homeland security," "suspicious mail" and "new normalcy."

The society will vote for the top words of 2001 on Friday, at its annual meeting in San Francisco. Nominated words and phrases are not necessarily new ones but those that were used last year in a prominent or distinctive way.

Wayne Glowka, chair of the society's new-words committee, is one of two or three members who traditionally submit nominating lists in advance, though anyone at the group's meeting can throw out suggestions. The top word or phrase for 2001 will be related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, predicted Glowka, an English professor at Georgia College and State University. "The Word of the Year is who we are and what we are in any given year....It comes down to a feeling." Previous Word of the Year winners tend to trigger a defining memory of the times: "Y2K" in 1999; the prefix "e-" in 1998, as in e-commerce; and "millennium bug" in 1997.

For 2001, Glowka's choice is "Let's roll," the phrase used by Todd Beamer before he and other passengers rushed hijackers on the United Airlines flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. Beamer's words were a "heroic reaction to an absolutely horrible day," Glowka said, noting that the expression was picked up by President Bush and used as a rallying cry. "When I first heard it, I was stirred."