Praise for the Pajamahadeen

One of the factors that has made English the dominant global language (overwhelming military, economic and cultural hegemony may have something to do with it as well) is the plasticity and adjustability of its lexicon. Unlike Spanish or French, there is no “Royal Academy” prescribing what is linguistically correct or acceptable. The closest we come are a handful of authoratative dictionaries and web sites which document rather than dictate the changing English landscape. The language can evolve and adapt, invent words and steal them from other languages or groups.

According to a column called The Word in the Sunday Globe the Number 1 new word lookup on the Merriman Webster online dictionary was – BLOG! Hard to believe that many people didn’t know what it meant!

WHAT WORDS WERE we using in 2004? Merriam-Webster knows: Its list of the year’s Top 10 terms is not a committee’s inventive effort but a dispassionate tally of lookups in its online dictionaries and thesaurus  m-w.com). And though blog ranks No. 1, politics and war are predictably dominant: Incumbent, electoral, insurgent, partisan, and sovereignty are all on the list.

Blog would have been old news at ADS  www.americandialect.org) whose members named it Most Likely to Succeed two years ago. But the blogosphere was winningly represented by the Most Creative word of 2004, pajamahadeen, or ”bloggers who challenge and fact-check traditional media.” The coinage, attributed to Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, was provoked by ex-CBS executive Jonathan Klein, who appeared on ”The O’Reilly Factor,” as Rathergate loomed, to defend traditional newsgathering.

The Word column by Jan Freeman