I’m not hogging the home page deliberately. It’s the absence of other porcine posters that causes my glut, but I have to mention that the Oxford American Dictionary has plumped for ‘gif’ as the word of the year. Which only goes to prove that I no longer live in the real world. ‘Gif’, my Backside! Something to do with techie life, I hear. I can relate to one of the runners-up, ‘Eurogeddon’ though, that end-of-the-world state caused by eurocratic megalomania.
Another invention from the Great American Election debates – ‘Romnesia’ – struck me as deserving of a place in posterity, to denote that endearing quality displayed by all successful politicians.
Do you have any contenders?
Boadicea's Chariot 
“Gif’ – word of the year? The format has been around since 1987 (according to Wiki) and the ‘word’ coined probably not long thereafter. So it’s been turned into a verb – so have many other respectable words!
I can offer plenty of words and phrases that particularly annoy me – but I wouldn’t like to offer them as words or phrases of the year.
I’ve never heard of this word, Janus. It sounds like something out of a WW2 film – “Ve vill gif you reason to regret zis, Engländer!” (Entschuldigung, Christopher)
GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format. It is a relatively simple format compared with some of the later ones It is one of the earliest graphic standards for computer images and even pre-dated the World Wide Web, and so I am not sure why it has been chosen as “Word of the year” in 2012
FEEG, thank you for confirming the accolade is ridiculous.
Btw I have netted an alien with a Chinese (?) avatar! Yes!
I admit to having used the noun “gif” a couple of times in the ten years or so, but I would hardly nominate it as word of the year, Janus.
I refer to my Olympic Stramash rant (point 11) and the mention of ‘medal’ used as a verb by a commentator as in, “He’s expected to medal in the BMX final tomorrow”.
OZ
Oh, Celtic! Make that ‘Stramash’ in the link., which works despite the typo.
OZ
Phenomenarse n.
Someone who displays the qualities of a complete sphincter then takes it up a notch. 🙂
As well as verbified nouns (to debut and to medal are the worst) I dislike ‘back in the day’, usually employed by numb-skulls with no past to reminisce about.
Thank you, FEEG. So it’s not really a word, just a collection of initial letters, like NATO. It’s always the Americans who damage the English language and the Brits just follow on. American brother-in-law told English cousin to “continue to dialogue with someone” and used “historic” instead of “historical” and she, a teacher of English, blithely followed his example. I could tick them both off, but that wouldn’t be “nice”!