Connect Aatmanirbhar, tweet, woman and 😂 | #135
Also, meet the inventor of the sachet 👉👉
“What's another word for Thesaurus?” - Steven Wright
Ever year, new words are added to the lexicon and every year, middle aged folk worldwide use these words in an attempt to look hip. Words such as bushlips, chad, truthiness, plutoed are some recent additions to the lexicon that have also been awarded the ‘word of the year’ by the American Dialect society. The society, along with others, adjudges the most important word or expression in the public sphere during the calendar year.
This week’s newsletter is dedicated to the Word of the Year. To quote a famous poet “It’s only words, And words are all I have. To take your heart away…..”
Things we learnt this week 🤓
Oxford University Press, famous for its dictionaries, started announcing their word of the year in 2004. They had separate words of the year for the UK and USA. In 2017, they added a Hindi word of the year to their list. The first Hindi word to become the word of the year was Aadhar. In 2020, thanks to the popularisation of the word by Modiji, Aatmanirbhar became the word of the year. Though some people still struggle with its pronunciation.
Given its popularity at the time, the Word of the Year in 2009 was tweet. They also chose a Word of the Decade and google won that award. In 2010, the Arab spring protest movement spread across the Arab world and Twitter helped the protestors to overcome the government censorship and spread the word. The transformation from tweet to twit probably tells us something about the current owners limiting character.
Dictionary.com uses a different criteria to select its word of the year. It looks at search trends on its website and news events surrounding it to decide the word of the year. And the winner of the word of the year 2022 is….. Woman. The word was searched during the confirmation hearing of US supreme court justice Ketanji Jackson, when many Republican senators asked her the definition of the word woman.
In 2015, Oxford’s word of the year wasn’t even a word. It was an emoji. Specifically this one: 😂
It was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015. Technology company SwiftKey identified that the ‘tears-of-joy’ emoji made up 20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US. You 👃🏼 it.
From IWTK, with love 💌
Most of us have used a sachet sometime or the other in our lives. Meet the man who came up with the idea.
Mahatma Gandhi didn’t have much time to watch movies. But he did watch two of them. More info here.
Only In India 🇮🇳
The circumstances might have been eggscruitating for the driver to eggscape. Wonder if the crime happened on a Fry Day. This is going to be a tough case to crack. Can’t wait for the movie adaption called Egg Force One.
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Stay hydrated,
❤️ IWTK