Global Language Monitor

The Global Language Monitor (GLM) is an Austin, Texas-based company that collectively documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language usage worldwide, with a particular emphasis upon the English language. It is particularly known for its Word of the Year, political analysis, college and university rankings, High Tech buzzwords,and media analytics.

History

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2003 by Paul J.J. Payack, the GLM describes its role as "expert analysis on language trends and their subsequent impact on politics, culture and business, including the PQ Index/Indicator, analysis of media coverage of major, worldwide events, the rise of Global English and its march to its 1,000,000th word, the Chinglish Phemomenon, Global yoofSpeak, and many others". In April 2008, GLM moved its headquarters from San Diego to Austin.

Top Words, Phrases and Names of the Year

Since 2000, the Global Language Monitor (GLM) has been selecting the Top Ten Words, Phrases and Names of the Year. To select these words and phrases it uses a statistical analysis of language usage in the worldwide print and electronic media, on the Internet and throughout the Blogosphere, including Social media.

GLM announced its Top Words of the Year for 2010 on November 15, 2009. The Word of the Year was 'Spillcam'. The Top Phrase of the Year was 'Anger and Rage'.

The Top Words of 2010

Rank/Word/Comments

1. Spillcam — The BP Spillcam instantly beamed the immensity of the Gulf Spill around the world to the dismay of environmentalists, BP’s PR staff and the President.

2. Vuvuzela — Brightly colored plastic horns that first came to prominence at the South African World Cup.

3. The Narrative – Though used at least since The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, ‘The Narrative’ has recently been gaining traction in the political arena, virtually replacing the need for a party’s platform. (Cf. to ‘truthily’.)

4. Refudiate — Conflation of “refute” and “repudiate” (un)officially coined by Sarah Palin.

5. Guido and Guidette — Hey! All things Jersey are hot, capish? (Actually, capisci in standard Italian.)

6. Deficit – A growing and possibly intractable problem for the economies of most of the developed world.

7. Snowmagedden (and ‘Snowpocalypse’) — Portmanteau words linking ‘snow’ with ‘apocalypse’ and ‘armageddon’, used to describe the record snowfalls in the US East Coast and Northern Europe last winter.

8. 3-D – Three-dimensional (as in movies) is buffo box office this year, but 3-D is being used in new ways generally describing ‘robustness’ in products (such as toothpaste).

9. Shellacking – President Obama’s description of the ‘old-fashioned thumpin’ in George W. Bush’s words, that Democrats received in the 2010 US Mid-term elections.

10. Simplexity – The paradox of simplifying complex ideas in order to make them easier to understand, the process of which only adds to their complexity.

Also Noted: (Spoken Only) Twenty-ten: Finally, a common way to refer to the year; Obamacare (noted as one of the Top Political Buzzwords).

The Top Phrases of 2010

Rank/Word/Comments

1. Anger and Rage – Characterizations of the US electorate by the pundits, though closer analyses has revealed more frustration and disappointment. Also witnessed in France, Spain and Greece.

2. Climate Change – (and Global Warming) No. 1 Phrase for the first decade of the 21st century; starts out second decade at No. 2.

3. The Great Recession – The media term frequently used to describe the on-going global economic restructuring.

4. Teachable Moment – Turning any undesirable outcome into a positive opportunity by using it as an object lesson. Unfortunately, there were a plethora of teachable moments in the first year of the new decade.

5. Tea Party — An emerging political movement in the US that has upset the balance of power in the US Congress.

6. Ambush Marketing – Cashing in at an event by taking on the appearance of a sponsor of the event. Most obviously displayed at the Vancouver Winter Olympics and South Africa’s World Cup 2010.

7. Lady Gaga — Gaga, herself, became a buzzword in the global entertainment industry in 2010.

8. Man Up – This election cycle’s signature retort from the women running for office to their male opponents.

9. Pass the bill to be able to see what’s in it — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s now infamous quip underlying the complexity of the Healthcare Reform legislation.

10. Obamamania — Notable only in it fall from grace; Obamamania now ranks at the bottom of this year’s political buzzwords.

Also Noted — Don’t Touch My Junk: One reaction to the TSA new search policies.

The Top Words of the Year for 2009 were headed by Twitter.

The Top Words of 2009

Rank/Word/Comments

1. twitter — The ability to encapsulate human thought in 140 characters

2. Obama- — The word stem transforms into scores of new words like ObamaCare

3. H1N1 — The formal (and politically correct) name for Swine Flu

4. stimulus — The $800 billion aid package meant to help mend the US economy

5. vampire — Vampires are very much en vogue, now the symbol of unrequited love

6. 2.0 — The 2.0 suffix is attached to the next generation of everything

7. deficit — Lessons from history are dire warnings here

8. hadron — Ephemeral particles subject to collision in the Large Hadron Collider

9. healthcare — The direction of which is the subject of intense debate in the US

10. transparency — Elusive goal for which many 21st c. governments are striving

11. outrage — In response to large bonuses handed out to ‘bailed-out’ companies

12. bonus — The incentive pay packages that came to symbolize greed and excess

13. unemployed — And underemployed amount to close to 20% of US workforce

14. foreclosure — Forced eviction for not keeping up with the mortgage payments

15. cartel — In Mexico, at the center of the battle over drug trafficking

The Top Phrases 2009

Rank/Phrase/Comments

1. King of Pop –Elvis was ‘The King;’ MJ had to settle for ‘King of Pop’

2. Obama-mania — One of the scores of words from the Obama-word stem

3. climate change — Considered politically neutral compared to global warming

4. swine flu — Popular name for the illness caused by the H1N1 virus

5. Too Large to Fail — Institutions that are deemed necessary for financial stability

6. cloud computing — Using the Internet for a variety of computer services

7. public option — The ability to buy health insurance from a government entity

8. Jai Ho! — A Hindi shout of joy or accomplishment

9. Mayan calendar — Consists of various ‘cycles,’ one of which ends on 21 December 2012

10. God particle — The Higgs boson, believed to hold the secrets of the Big Bang

Top Words, Phrases and Names of the Decade

The Top Words of the Decade from 2000 to 2009 were headed by Global Warming.

The Top Words of the Decade from 2000–2009

Word/Year/Comments

1. global warming (2000) Rated highly from Day One of the decade

2. 9/11 (2001) Another inauspicious start to the decade

3. Obama- (2008 ) The US President’s name as a ‘root’ word or ‘word stem’

4. bailout (2008) The Bank Bailout was but Act One of the crisis

5. evacuee/refugee (2005) After Katrina, refugees became evacuees

6. derivative (2007) Financial instrument or analytical tool that engendered the Meltdown

7. google (2007) Founders misspelled actual word ‘googol’

8. surge (2007) The strategy that effectively ended the Iraq War

9. Chinglish (2005) The Chinese-English Hybrid language growing larger as Chinese influence expands

10. tsunami (2004) Southeast Asian Tsunami took 250,000 lives

11. H1N1 (2009) More commonly known as Swine Flu

12. subprime (2007) Subprime mortgages were another bubble to burst

13. dot.com (2000) The Dot.com bubble engendered no lifelines, no bailouts

14. Y2K (2000) The Year 2000: all computers would turn to pumpkins at the strike of midnight

15. misunderestimate (2002) One of the first and most enduring of Bushisms

16. chad (2000) Those Florida voter punched card fragments that the presidency would turn aupon

17. twitter (2008) A quarter of a billion references on Google

18. WMD (2002) Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction

19. blog (2003) First called ‘web logs’ which contracted into blogs

20. texting (2004) Sending 140 character text messages over cell phones

21. slumdog (2008) Child inhabitants of Mumba’s slums

22. sustainable (2006) The key to ‘Green’ living where natural resources are never depleted

23. Brokeback (2004) New term for ‘gay’ from the Hollywood film ‘Brokeback Mountain’

24. quagmire (2004) Would Iraq War end up like Vietnam, another ‘quagmire’?

25. truthiness (2006) Stephen Colbert’s addition to the language appears to be a keeper

Also worth noting: ’Embedded’ (2003) to embed reporters with US Troops

The Top Phrases of the Decade from 2000–2009

Word/Year/Comments

1. climate change (2000) Green words in every form dominant the decade

2. Financial Tsunami (2008) One quarter of the world’s wealth vanishes seemingly overnight

3. ground zero (2001) Site of 9/11terrorist attack in New York City

4. War on Terror (2001) Bush administration’s response to 9/11

5. Weapons of Mass Destruction (2003) Bush’s WMDs never found in Iraq or the Syrian desert

6. swine flu (2008) H1N1, please, so as not to offend the pork industry or religious sensitivities!

7. “Let’s Roll!” (2001) Todd Beamer’s last words before Flight 93 crashed into the PA countryside

8. Red State/Blue State (2004) Republican or Democratic control of states

9. carbon footprint (2007) How much CO² does an activity produce?

10. shock-and-awe (2003) Initial strategy of Iraq War

11. Ponzi scheme (2009) Madoff’s strategy reaped billions & heartache

12. Category 4 (2005) Force of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’ seawalls and levies

13. King of Pop (2000) Elvis was the King, MJ the King (of Pop)

14. “Stay the course” (2004) Dubya’s off-stated guidance for Iraq War

15. “Yes, we can!” (2008) Obama’s winning campaign slogan

16. “Jai Ho!” (2008) Shout of joy from ‘Slumdog Millionaire’

17. “Out of the Mainstream” (2003) Complaint about any opposition’s political platform

18. cloud computing (2007) Using the Internet as a large computational device

19. threat fatigue (2004) One too many terrorist threat alerts

20. same-sex marriage (2003) Marriage of gay couples

High tech terms

On March 17, 2010, the Global Language Monitor presented the Most Confusing High Tech Buzzwords of the decade (2000-2009) .

1. HTTP — HyperText Transfer Protocol is used for HTML (HyperText Markup Language) files. 2. Flash — As in Flash Memory. “Flash’ is easier to say than “ I brought the report on my EEPROM chip with a thin oxide layer separating a floating gate and control gate utilizing Fowler-Nordheim electron tunneling”. 3. God Particle – The Higgs boson, thought to account for mass. The God Particle has eluded discovery since its existence was first postulated some thirty years ago. 4. Cloud Computing – Distributing or accessing programs and services across the Internet. (The Internet is represented as a cloud.) 5. Plasma (as in plasma TV) — Refers to a kind of television screen technology that uses matrix of gas plasma cells, which are charged by differing electrical voltages to create an image. 6. IPOD – Apple maintains that the idea of the iPod was from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. 7. Megapixel – One million pixels or picture elements. 8. Nano – Widely used to describe anything small as in nanotechnology. Like the word ‘mini’ which originally referred to the red hues in Italian miniature paintings, the word nano- is ultimately derived from the ancient Greek word for ‘dwarf’. 9. Resonate – Not the tendency of a system to oscillate at maximum amplitude, but the ability to relate to (or resonate with) a customer’s desires. 10. Virtualization – Around since the late ‘70s, virtualization now applies to everything from infrastructures to I/O.

On November 19, 2008 Global Language Monitor announced the most confusing yet frequently cited high tech buzzwords of 2008 to be cloud computing, green washing, and buzzword compliant followed by resonate, de-duping, and virtualization. Rounding out the Top Ten were Web 2.0, versioning, word clouds, and petaflop. The most confusing Acronym for 2008 was SaaS (software as a service).

On 14 October 2007 GLM released a list of the most confusing high tech terms and buzzwords. The words included: iPod, flash, cookie, nano and kernel, followed by megahertz, cell (as in cell phone), plasma, de-duplication and Blu-Ray. Other terms being tracked included terabyte, memory, core, and head crash. The most confusing acronym was found to be SOA, for service-oriented architecture, an acronym which IBM published a book about.

The studies are released each year on the anniversary of the cookie, the invention that made the World Wide Web practical for widespread surfing, communication, and e-commerce.

Counting English words

GLM announced the 1,000,000th English word on June 10, 2009. This controversial exercise was widely covered in the global media. The count itself was widely criticized by a number of prominent members of the linguistic community on the grounds that since there is no generally accepted definition of a word, there can never be a definitive count.

The finalists, which met the criteria of a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution and depth of citations, were:

1. Web 2.0. 2. Jai Ho! 3. N00b. 4. Slumdog. 5. Cloud Computing. 6. Carbon Neutral. 7. Slow Food. 8. Octomom. 9. Greenwashing. 10. Sexting. 11. Shovel ready. 12. Defriend. 13. Chengguan. 14. Recessionista. 15. Zombie Banks.

Critics also noted that the target date had been changed a number of times from late in 2006 to early in 2009, a difference of 0.0018 in the life of a 1400-year old language. It was also criticized on grounds that a count is impossible because there is no possible objective definition of "word." Global Language Monitor states the general criteria for inclusion on its site, maintaining that it is simply updating the established criteria for printed dictionaries beginning with the works of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster.

The New York Times described the PQI as "an algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet in relation to frequency, context and appearance in global media. It is a weighted index that takes into account year-to-year increases and acceleration in the last several months".In general terms, GLM describes its Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), used to run its analytics on global language trends and , as a weighted index, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum and velocity, using frequency data on words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, and throughout the blogosphere, as well as in proprietary databases (Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, etc.). It can also create "signals" that can be used in a variety of applications.

Obama an English language word

On 20 February 2008 GLM announced that the latest word to enter the English language was "obama", derived from Barack Obama, in its many variations. GLM described Obama- as a "root" for words including obamanomics, obamican, obamamentum, obamacize, obamarama, obamaNation, Obamafy, obamamania and obamacam. GLM announced it to be an accepted word, once it met the group's published criteria: a minimum of 25,000 citations in the global media, as well as achieving the necessary 'breadth' and 'depth' of citations.

Other lists

The Global Language Monitor publishes other lists relating to the English language including: rankings of U.S. colleges according to their presence in the media, (Universities: 1. Michigan, 2. Harvard, 3. Chicago; Colleges: 1. Carleton, 2. Williams, 3 Pomona); top fashion cities ranked by media exposure.(1. New York, 2. Hong Kong, 3. London); and 15 Top All-Time Bushisms.

External links

• Official Site