Words To the Wise

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary has selected their word of the year. The winner: w00t, a word popular with online gamers “expressing joy, possibly after a triumph or for no reason at all.” The list of runner-ups is available here. (I guess Islamofascism will have to wait until next year.) Also from the downside of techno-jargon, AP reports that, alarmingly, “Nearly 95 percent of e-mail is junk.” For the best lexicography has to offer, William Safire (pictured here) recently singled out some favorite entries in 2007’s new fleet of dictionaries and compiled them in his venerable “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine. After dipping into the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Safire writes: “It was good to see the verb smoosh finally made it.”