After reading the "Words of the decade" article I realised that newly coined words can provide a great insight to the mood of the time, and also what people were thinking about in the period. The methodology of actually acquiring this data of the most used words of the decade was done by "The Global Language Monitor" an American company who use mathematical formulas to track the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media. They compiled a list of the most used words and found some interesting discoveries.
"Global warming" and "9/11" turned out to be the most used words of the decade suggesting English speaking countries (of which we can assume predominantly includes the US and the UK) fears of both terrorism and the increasing threat of global warming as we make further advancements into the area. Also interesting is the American use of 9/11 as in Britain this would constitute as being the November 9th rather than the actual date of its intended meaning September the 11th. Obviously this indicates the obvious that America has a larger population and therefore more mouths or fingers to use there method. However when thinking of how I personally refer to the attack on the twin towers I to adopt the American order saying "9/11". This perhaps suggests or rather shows how American culture is and has become more so over the recent decades a dominant culture.
Also making it in third place is the proper noun "Obama"referring to the now president of the US. This is extremely telling as before Obama's rise in popularity and prominence,largely due to the fact of being the first black president, Obama was an almost unheard of name within the English language. Also interesting is how "Obama" its self became a word stem, producing new words such as Obamalicious. This again is also a tell tale sign of the US being a dominant and for all intensive purposes a popular culture at least with in English speaking countries.
Another incident we can tell was very impacting on many of us during the start of the 21st century was the financial crisis inserting word into our vocabulary such as "bailout" coming in at 4th place. This again allows us to infer that the financial crisis was big news. In fact if we look at the top 4 words most used, all derive from events or stories that were covered almost religiously by the news as well as appearing on social media. This also suggests that our main influences are these two forms of media. Another clear example of events adapting our language through the media would be 2004's tsunami after the Indian ocean earth quake. Which indeed did vastly increase our use of the term tsunami.
However this idea that the media is largely responsible, at least for a most used words, could be exaggerated by the method in which the data is collected in the first place. All of the data is collated from print and electronic media. Quite simply of the data is written langue rather than spoken. This of course has an effect on the order of most used words and could instead be considered a list of most written words.
Another area which has spawned the creation of new and most used words is that of technology. with the 21st century being the age of technology this is no surprise with words like Google being added to the dictionary and also going under functional shifts, in Google's case from proper noun to verb. also within the technology sub-category are "Twitter" also becoming another stem word e.g "twitterholic". All this again shows how technology and social media have had a profound impact on our lives. We also see the use of affixation to create new meaning for words deriving from the world of social media such as the term "unfriend" which is interesting again as it shows a functional shift in friend turning it from a noun to a dynamic verb.
Also portrayed by the data collated us our love of films and all things Hollywood, or at least how it effects us. For instance 2005's Oscar nominated film "Brokeback mountain" has resulted in the term "brokeback" meaning gay.
All these new words and phrases clearly paint a picture of the time we live in and what our minds are thinking at the time, with the most used or long lasting showing us the stories of the decade. The words also suggest however what emotions take precedent in our minds and by looking at our top two "9/11" and "globalwarming" it would seem that fear and concern seem to dominate our speech and language, with perhaps "Obama" being a solution to these problems.
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