Plutoed

That was the word of the year chosen in 2006 by the American Dialect Society, which is now seeking nominations for this year's winner. And I don't even know what it means. I'm inclined to believe that the most popular new words in any year will fall into obscurity a few years later. But most of the choices have been prescient, if you look at the winners for 2005, 2004, 2002, and 2001. (Respectively: truthiness, red state/blue state [but no longer purple state, so much], WMD, 9/11.)

Thankfully, this is is not the case with 2003 (metrosexual), and the winners of 2000 and 1999 (chad; Y2K) still exist but are no longer relevant. Then there are outmoded terms from the previous decade: millennium bug (1997), World Wide Web (1995), information superhighway (1993), Not! (1992).

Judging from the list, our discourse in the 1990s was dominated by technology, and now it is dominated by politics. For this year, I would probably nominate "surge."