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Top Ten Word Lists of 2002
Released by yourDictionary.com
Lists include Top Ten Words, People's Names, California
YouthSpeak, Top Phrases, Corporate Buzzwords, Sports, Best &
Worse Corporate Name Changes, Internet-related, and more.
Danville, California. December 25, 2002. yourDictionary.com (YDC), the premier global
language portal, today announced the release of its lists of the most important words of
2001, including lists of the overall Top Ten Words, Personal Names, California
YouthSpeak, Top Phrases, Corporate Buzzwords, Sports, Best and Worse of Corporate
Names, Internet-related terms, and various other topics.
According to Paul JJ Payack, chairman, president and The WordMan of
yourDictionary.com, "Our lists attempt to capture that evolution and innovations in word
choice and usage that tell us something about ourselves." The linguistic specialists at
yourDictionary.com queried experts (and word warriors) around the world to determine
their rankings.
Words and comments by the staff and visitors at yourDictionary.com.
Top Ten Words of 2002
Word
Comment
1. Misunderestimate
What President Bush’s opponents have
learned not to do, in his own word.
This time an uplifting story about
Pennsylvania coal miners and not a ‘reality
TV’ series.
A new danger found lurking in our food,
named for the same man (Joseph Lister)
who invented the surgical antiseptic now
used as a mouthwash, Listerine.
The parading of criminals in handcuffs
before the cameras. It made the news only
as some of the nation's most distinguished
faces began appearing there.
What people are increasingly out of, a
computer term now applied to modern life.
2. Survivor
3. Listeria
4. Perp-walk
5. Bandwidth
Top Ten Words of 2002
6. Sniper
7. To nasdaq
8. Warlords
9. Issue
10. Pedophilia
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As around the Beltway. The US discovered
that terrorists do not have a monopoly on
terror.
As in, "His fortune was nasdaqued." The
bubble of the mid-to-late ‘90s returns to
reality and adds a worthy item to our
vocabulary.
The freedom fighters of an earlier era today
are now a threat to delicate Afghani
democracy.
A great new euphemism for problem, fault
or any other type of misstep; we no longer
repair the fault, we simply ‘resolve’ the
issue.
Not the love of feet, though it has rocked
the Catholic Church to its foundations.
Top Ten Personal Names of 2002
Name
Comment
1. W. (Dubya)
George W. Bush remains at the center of
the whirlwind.
The Republican’s November surprise thrust
him back into the spotlight and he made the
most of it at Strom Thurmond’s 100th
birthday party.
More properly, Bernard Cardinal Law, who
was ousted from the Boston Archdiocese
for his mishandling of the sexual abuse
scandal.
After her husband's defeat in his bid for the
presidency, Ms. Dole returns to Washington
as the Republican Senator from North
Carolina.
Last year’s consensus Man of the Year now
reaping millions as a consultant, speaker
and author.
MTV’s dysfunctional family hit has
unleashed Ozzie’s clan to the world-atlarge.
The nemesis of former president Bush who
won the presidential ‘election’ in Iraq with
100% of the vote and now faces Mr. Bush's
son in a showdown.
Dead or alive, still making news.
2. Trent Lott
3. Cardinal Law
4. Elizabeth Dole
5. Rudolph Giuliani
6. The Osbornes
7. Saddam Hussein
8. Osama bin Laden
Top Ten Words of 2002
9. Martha Stewart
10. Al Gore
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This year has definitely not been ‘a good
thing’.
Cleared the way for President Bush to win
his next election for President by gracefully
bowing out of contention.
Top Phrases of the Year
Word
Comment
1. Threat Fatigue
The dulling of the senses to imminent
terrorist threats.
2. Weapons of Mass Destruction
The key to whether the US will stage an
aggressive attack on Iraq.
2002 was a sad year as record numbers of
Palestinian youth decided to trade their
lives for Israeli lives.
An idea that might have outperformed Air
Jordans landed Richard Reid in jail and
initiated the shoe search at US airports.
A disease of accounting practices that
spread widely throughout US businesses.
The conviction that everything on the Web
should be free—or, at least, paid for by
someone else.
3. Suicide bomber
4. Shoe bomb
5. Infectious enronitis
6. Dot communism
Top Ten California YouthSpeak
Word
Comment
1. Hottie
Object of affection, either personally or in
the cultural milieu.
Variation of ‘for sure’, popularized by rapper
Snoop Dogg.
Replacing 'cool'.
2. For shizzle
3. Tight
4. Phat
5. Hella
6. Wassup
7. Flow
8. Toppins
Way cool, as in ‘rolling phat’.
An intensive: hella tight or hella phat.
This greeting refuses to die, entering
mainstream circles.
Dinero, money. Originally from ‘cash flow’.
Also, ‘bank’ for lots of flow.
Perfect. In the California version of
Cockney rhyming slang ‘toppins’ rhymes
Top Ten Words of 2002
9. Bling Bling
10. Stog
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with Poppins, which connotes Mary
Poppins who was ‘perfect in every way’.
The sounds of diamond and gold jewelry
clinking together.
Cigarette, short for ‘stogy’.
Bonus California YouthSpeak Phenomenon of Note
Phenomenon
Comment
Up Talking
Ending all sentences with a rising or
upward inflection, as if asking a question.
Top 5 Words Coined By President Bush (Bushisms)
Name
Comment
1. Misunderestimate
To seriously underestimate.
2. Embetter
To make emotionally better (antonym to
embitter).
3. Resignate
To resonate as in, "They said this issue
wouldn't resignate with the People.”
4. Foreign-handed
To understand the complexity of
geopolitical realities from the various global
perspectives, as in "I have a foreign-handed
foreign policy”.
5. Analyzation
To fully study a subject, as in "This case
has had full analyzation and has been
looked at a lot”.
Best New Product Names
Name
Comment
1. Trikke Scooter
Great name for an unconventional threewheeled scooter.
High tech fabric that utilizes
nanotechnology to create a super-smooth,
stain-resistant fabric.
2. Nano-Tex
3. Twist and Pour Paints
The paint container that’s designed to let
the user ‘twist-and-pour’ the paint. The
name says it all.
Top Ten Words of 2002
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Worst New Product Names
Name
1. A5250
2. Jaguar
3. Touareg
Comment
Youth batting helmet. A great product with
a not-so-great name.
Apple’s new version of the OS X operating
system. An internal code-name that
somehow slipped Apple’s usually expert
marketing maze.
Volkswagen's new SUV named in French
after the nomadic North African tribe.
Best Corporate Name Change
Name
Comment
1. American Home Products
To Wyeth, good move. American Home
Products does not exactly connote the
company’s new core competencies of
synthetic chemistry: molecules,
recombinant proteins and vaccines.
Last year's worst product name looks better
and better the further Andersen sinks.
2. Accenture
Worst Corporate Name Change
Name
Comment
1. BearingPoint
(or BreakingPoint?) KPMG’s attempt to
distance itself from the rest of the former
‘Big Six’ accounting firms.
Still doing business as Enron!? The crisis
management rulebook calls for a clean
break with the past to re-position the
company. But then Enron never was one
to follow the rules.
2. Enron
Top Hot Color Words
Color
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Cornflower
Periwinkle
Cerulean
Plum
Cerise
Comment
Shade of blue
Grey/blue
Blue
Purple
Pink
Top Ten Words of 2002
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Top Internet-related Words Moving into Widespread Use
Word
Comment
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
To converse as in, “Let’s interface”.
To perform several tasks at the same time.
To start over or begin a new effort.
(or RAM). Unable to multi-task.
As in ‘My hard drive crashed’.
Interface
Multi-task
Reboot
Out of Bandwidth
Crash
Top Sports-related Words
Word
1. BCS
2. Grand Slam
Comment
College football’s Bowl Championship
Series to crown a national championship in
lieu of a playoff.
Tiger Woods did not win all four of golf’s
major tourneys in the same year, though he
did own all four trophies at the same time;
dubbed the ‘Tiger Slam’.
Top Corporate Words or Phrases
Word
Comment
1. The Schultz Defense
"I know nothing . . . nothing!" From the
running line of the pudgy German guard in
the now defunct TV series "Hogan's
Heroes."
The belief that all on-line services should be
free
(of documents). Correspondence does not
need to be shredded, if it is published by
the Web and internet.
Easy-to-win accounts.
The technique of ranking employees
annually and then cutting the lowest 10%
loose.
2. Dot-communism
3. Dematerialization
4. Low-hanging Fruit
5. ‘Rank-and-Yank’
Top Advertising Word
Word
Comment
Frothy
A fresh or original idea. Supplants ‘edgy’
which was THE word for a few years now.
Top Ten Words of 2002
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Five Top Misspelled Words
Word
Comment
1. Grateful
You should be grateful to know that keeping
"great" out of "grateful" is great.
This word is governed by one of the rare
rules of English orthography, so why not
enjoy it? After [c] and [g], [e] is retained to
indicate the letter is "soft," i.e. pronounced
like [s] or [j], respectively.
The apostrophe marks a contraction of "it
is." Something that belongs to it is "its."
Flounder is a fish; ‘to founder’ is to run
aground.
What is more embarrassing than to misspell
the name of the problem?
2. Judgement
3. Its/it's
4. Founder
5. Misspell
Most frequently spoken word on the Planet:
O.K.
Still the most popular word in languages
around the world.
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