The New Oxford American Dictionary recently announced unfriend as its Word of the Year for 2009, with notable runners-up death panel and teabagger bringing up the rear.2009 is the last year of this decade, the one that started with that awful Y2K non-tastrophe. As such, we thought this would be a good time for us to celebrate the bon mots of the aughts. Whether you're a regular wordsmith or a guy who thinks lexicon is the name of a really smart Autobot, we guarantee you'll want to retweet our Words of the Decade. (Yep, it's in there.)
Not to be confused with googol, which is a number, Googling is as much second nature to us now as shouting "Operator! Give me Klondike 5-4000!" was to your mom. Now, the hot trend is Googling yourself, which just makes us glad there was never a popular search engine called Finger.com. Interestingly, the Merriam-Webster online definition of Google comes with this helpful tip: Learn more about "google" with Bing! (2001)
WMD
Probably the most famous phrase for something that turned out not to exist. Aside from causing a war that killed tens of thousands, it also has the distinction of being the punch line to one of the worst jokes ever. (2002)
Blog
Roiling opposition to the Iraq War and everything Bush spurred the rise of a brand new form of journalism that made Cheeto-stained pajamas the new uniform of America's news editors. (2003)
Tsunami
Did it really take the deaths of 300,000 people for you to learn the difference between a tsunami and a tidal wave? (2004)
Levee
Until Hurricane Katrina, most of us simply thought of a levee as a dry destination for your Swift. Thanks to the catastrophic failure of levees in the Gulf Coast region, we know better now. (2005)
When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth. Similarly, when there was no more room on Orkut due to all of the porn spam, America migrated to Facebook for all of their social networking and time-wasting needs. (2006)
w00t, pwn, Fail!, etc.
The syntax of the lonely gamer came into its own here, as long-simmering Internet memes, aided by the popularity of something called YouTube, crossed over into the mainstream. (2007)
The Twitter Family of Words
Twitter, tweet, Twitterverse, tweeps, twagina ... Replace any word's first two letters with "tw," and you've got a tword. Be twareful with words like what. (2008)
Socialist
Prior to this year, socialist had a very specific meaning, but since the inauguration of President Obama, it has become a catch-all for angry people with ill-fitting T-shirts and misspelled signs. While it used to refer to an economic system in which the government owns the means of production and distribution of goods and services, now it just means anything you pay taxes toward that isn't used to kill or preach. (2009)
