Slate is covering the announcement by Merriam-Webster of the top ten words of the year for 2010:
Say what you will about its appeal (or lack thereof) as fiscal policy, but the Top Word of 2010, according to Merriam-Webster, is austerity. The distinction is based on its popularity on the dictionary’s Web site, and runners-up were pragmatic, moratorium, socialism, bigot, doppelgänger, shellacking, ebullient, dissident, and furtive. Try using all of those in a sentence.
OK. How’s this?
A new breed of dissidents, taking aim at the dominant big-government, socialism light, “soft bigotry of low expectations” mindset of the past few decades, is standing ebulliently atop the shellacking the Democrats took last November, casting themselves as pragmatists in favor of across-the-board governmental austerity–moratoriums at the very least–and contrary to past furtive custom, they are proudly open about their agenda even at the tail end of the Great Recession, happily running the risk of being called Hoover’s doppelgangers.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
