2007 Word of the Year

January 24, 2008 - 266 views

The American Dialect Society chose “subprime” as 2007’s Word of the Year at its annual convention Friday. “‘Subprime’ has been around with bankers for awhile, but now everyone is talking about ’subprime,”‘ said Wayne Glowka, a spokesman for the group and a dean at Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia. “It’s affecting all kinds of people in all kinds of places.”

The choice signifies the public’s concern for a “deepening mortgage crisis,” the society said in a statement.

Several people lobbied for “green,” which “designates environmental concern,” but the term has been around for years, he said. The word topped the 2007 “Most Useful” category, one of numerous subgroups the society choses.

The group also decided that although “waterboarding,” an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, gained a lot of attention during recent attorney general confirmation hearings, it was a bigger deal in 2004, Glowka said.

The prefix “sub” translates roughly to “below the standard,” while “prime” means something close to “the best.”

So, according to Glowka, the word really means “far below the best.”

“People were saying that students were referring to their tests, ‘I’m going to subprime this; I’m going to mess it up,”‘ he said.

The American Dialect Society, founded in 1889, comprises linguists, grammarians, historians and scholars, among others. The society began choosing words of the year in 1990 for fun, not in an official capacity to induct words into the English language.

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