By Erin McKean. January 9, 2011

I know, it’s getting a little late to reminisce about 2010. But besides being a new year, it has also been about a year since I started writing about language for Ideas (thanks again to Jan Freeman for sharing this column!), and I thought it would be fun to look back at a year’s worth of the best and worst stories about words.

From a lexicographer’s point of view, the best language story of 2010 was the recent paper in Science about “culturomics.” The authors define this term as “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture,” but what they literally did, working with Google Books, was take the full text of a huge number of books — about 4 percent of all titles ever published — and crunch the words as data, on the model of the Human Genome Project.

One amazing finding: They estimated “that 52% of the English lexicon — the majority of the words used in English books — consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references.” They found vast quantities of words like aridification, slenthem (a musical instrument), and deletable, none of them in normal dictionaries. Time to get crackin’, fellow lexicographers!

Along with their study came a public release of billions of sorted phrases, ranging up to five words in length, and a tool that allows any user to chart how common specific words are over time (it’s at www.ngrams.googlelabs.com). As fascinating as they are, these graphs have also led to lots of great discussion about one big thing missing from the data: the context in which the words are used. When we use the word class, are we talking about social rank (“middle class”) or school (“geometry class”)? That kind of analysis will have to wait for a different tool.
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By Andrew Alexander. Friday, January 7, 2011

Read the online comments accompanying any story on immigration and you get a taste of the impassioned public debate over what to do about those who may be unlawfully in the country unlawfully. For news organizations, there’s a secondary discussion heating up over what to call them.

The dilemma is not new. Most newsrooms settled on terminology long ago. Many adhere to the widely followed guidance of the Associated Press, which prefers “illegal immigrant.” The Post’s internal stylebook says “undocumented immigrant” also may be used.

Discussion was renewed recently when Leo E. Laurence, a San Diego journalist and member of the diversity committee of the Society of Professional Journalists, wrote a column for the organization’s magazine urging “undocumented” rather than “illegal.”

“Simply put, only a judge, not a journalist, can say that someone is an ‘illegal,’” he wrote. Laurence, who was offering a personal view that SPJ has not endorsed, soon ended up in a spirited on-air disagreement with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, who suggested that refusing to use the term “illegal” is “political correctness gone mad.” The exchange sparked robust debate in the blogosphere.

Among journalists, Laurence is not alone in his view.
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