Top Ten Words of 2002
1. Misunderestimate What President Bush’s opponents have learned not to do, in his own word.
2. Survivor This time an uplifting story about Pennsylvania coal miners and not a ‘reality TV’ series. .
3. Listeria A new danger found lurking in our food, named for the same man (Joseph Lister) who invented the surgical antiseptic now used as a mouthwash, Listerine.
4. Perp-walk The parading of criminals in handcuffs before the cameras. It made the news only as some of the nation's most distinguished faces began appearing there.
5. Bandwidth What people are increasingly out of, a computer term now applied to modern life.
6. Sniper As around the Beltway. The US discovered that terrorists do not have a monopoly on terror.
7. To nasdaq As in, "His fortune was nasdaqued." The bubble of the mid-to-late ‘90s returns to reality and adds a worthy item to our vocabulary.
8. Warlords The freedom fighters of an earlier era today are now a threat to delicate Afghani democracy.
9. Issue A great new euphemism for problem, fault or any other type of misstep; we no longer repair the fault, we simply ‘resolve’ the issue.
10. Pedophilia Not the love of feet, though it has rocked the Catholic Church to its foundations.
Top Ten Personal Names of 2002
1. W (Dubya) George W. Bush remains at the center of the whirlwind.
2. Trent Lott The Republican’s November surprise thrust him back into the spotlight and he made the most of it at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party.
3. Cardinal Law More properly, Bernard Cardinal Law, who was ousted from the Boston Archdiocese for his mishandling of the sexual abuse scandal.
4. Elizabeth Dole After her husband's defeat in his bid for the presidency, Ms. Dole returns to Washington as the Republican Senator from North Carolina.
5. Rudolph Giuliani Last year’s consensus Man of the Year now reaping millions as a consultant, speaker and author.
6. The Osbournes MTV’s dysfunctional family hit has unleashed Ozzie’s clan to the world-at-large.
7. Saddam Hussein The nemesis of former president Bush who won the presidential ‘election’ in Iraq with 100% of the vote and now faces Mr. Bush's son in a showdown.
8. Osama bin Laden Dead or alive, still making news.
9. Martha Stewart This year has definitely not been ‘a good thing’.
10. Al Gore Cleared the way for President Bush to win his next election for President by gracefully bowing out of contention.
Top Ten California Youthspeak
1. Hottie Object of affection, either personally or in the cultural milieu.
2. For shizzle Variation of ‘for sure’, popularized by rapper Snoop Dogg.
3. Tight Replacing 'cool'.
4. Phat Way cool, as in ‘rolling phat’.
5. Hella An intensive: hella tight or hella phat.
6. Wassup This greeting refuses to die, entering mainstream circles.
7. Flow Dinero, money. Originally from ‘cash flow’. Also, ‘bank’ for lots of flow.
8. Poppins Perfect. In the California version of Cockney rhyming slang ‘toppins’ rhymes with Poppins, which connotes Mary Poppins who was ‘perfect in every way’.
9. Bling bling The sounds of diamond and gold jewelry clinking together.
10. Stog Cigarette, short for ‘stogy’.
Bonus California Youthspeak Phenomenon of Note
1. Up Talking Ending all sentences with a rising or upward inflection, as if asking a question.
Top Phrases of 2002
1. Threat Fatigue The dulling of the senses to imminent terrorist threats.
2. Weapons of Mass Destruction The key to whether the US will stage an aggressive attack on Iraq.
3. Suicide Bomber 2002 was a sad year as record numbers of Palestinian youth decided to trade their lives for Israeli lives.
4. Shoe Bomb An idea that might have outperformed Air Jordans landed Richard Reid in jail and initiated the shoe search at US airports
5. Infectious enronitis A disease of accounting practices that spread widely throughout US businesses.
6. Homeland Security A new phrase of mysterious origins naming the national response to 9/11.
7. Dot communism The conviction that everything on the Web should be free-or, at least, paid for by someone else.
Top 5 Words Coined by President Bush (Bushisms)
1. Misunderestimate To seriously underestimate.
2. Embetter To make emotionally better (antonym to embitter).
3. Resignate To resonate as in, "They said this issue wouldn't resignate with the People.”
4. Foreign-handed To understand the complexity of geopolitical realities from the various global perspectives, as in "I have a foreign-handed foreign policy”.
5. Analyzation To fully study a subject, as in "This case has had full analyzation and has been looked at a lot”.
Best New Product Names
1. Trikke Scooter Great name for an unconventional three-wheeled scooter
2. Nano Tex High tech fabric that utilizes nanotechnology to create a super-smooth, stain-resistant fabric.
3. Twist and Pour Paints The paint container that’s designed to let the user ‘twist-and-pour’ the paint. The name says it all.
Worst New Product Names
1. A5250 Youth batting helmet. A great product with a not-so-great name
2. Jaguar Apple’s new version of the OS X operating system. An internal code-name that somehow slipped Apple’s usually expert marketing maze.
3. Touareg Volkswagen's new SUV named in French after the nomadic North African tribe.
Best Corporate Name Change
1. American Home Products To Wyeth, good move. American Home Products does not exactly connote the company’s new core competencies of synthetic chemistry: molecules, recombinant proteins and vaccines.
2. Accenture Last year's worst product name looks better and better the further Andersen sinks.
Worst Corporate Name Changes
1. Bearing Point (or BreakingPoint?) KPMG’s attempt to distance itself from the rest of the former ‘Big Six’ accounting firms.
2. Enron Still doing business as Enron!? The crisis management rulebook calls for a clean break with the past to re-position the company. But then Enron never was one to follow the rules.
Top Corporate Words or Phrasees
1. The Schultz Defense "I know nothing . . . nothing!" From the running line of the pudgy German guard in the now defunct TV series "Hogan's Heroes."
2. Dot communism The belief that all on-line services should be free.
3. Dematerialization (of documents) Correspondence does not need to be shredded, if it is published by the Web and internet.
4. Low-hanging Fruit Easy-to-win accounts.
5. Rank-and-Yank The technique of ranking employees annually and then cutting the lowest 10% loose.
Top Advertising Word
1. Frothy A fresh or original idea. Supplants ‘edgy’ which was THE word for a few years now.
Top Internet Words Moving into Widespread Use
1. Interface To converse as in, “Let’s interface”.
2. Multi-task To perform several tasks at the same time.
3. Reboot To start over or begin a new effort.
4. Out of Bandwidth (or RAM) Unable to multi-task..
5. Crash As in ‘My hard drive crashed’.
Top Color-related Words
1. Cornflower Shade of blue
2. Periwinkle Grey/blue
3. Cerulean Blue
4. Plum Purple
5. Cerise Pink
Top Sports-related Words
1. BCS College football’s Bowl Championship Series to crown a national championship in lieu of a playoff.
2. Grand Slam Tiger Woods did not win all four of golf’s major tourneys in the same year, though he did own all four trophies at the same time; dubbed the ‘Tiger Slam’.
Top Five Most Misspelled Words
1. Grateful You should be grateful to know that keeping "great" out of "grateful" is great.
2. Judgement This word is governed by one of the rare rules of English orthography, so why not enjoy it? After [c] and [g], [e] is retained to indicate the letter is "soft," i.e. pronounced like [s] or [j], respectively.
3. Its/it's The apostrophe marks a contraction of "it is." Something that belongs to it is "its."
4. Founder Flounder is a fish; ‘to founder’ is to run aground.
5. Misspell What is more embarrassing than to misspell the name of the problem?
Most frequently spoken word on the Planet:
1. O.K. Still the most popular word in languages around the world.
