Tuesdays with Media: OED's Word of the Year, 2015

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the odd choices the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) made with new the entries they were adding for the first time.  This time around, I'll simply be focusing on the word the OED declared as the word of the year for 2015.  The word is .  For my readers that don't know, that little picture is called an emoji, and it's mostly used in text messaging.  Even when it shows up in other places, it only appears in text-based communication since it can't be spoken.

This year's word choice (excuse me, "word choice") is stupid.  According to the OED, they chose it because it "best reflect the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015," but it's still really dumb.  I accept that emoji are a part of life nowadays, but that doesn't make them words.  I think of words as a form of communication that is used verbally and can be represented on page or screen with text -- that is to say, words are verbal first and visual second.  According to the OED's definition, a word can be either spoken or written, so I suppose by their standard it fits, but it doesn't make it any less stupid.

And it's especially frustrating because one of the words that made it to the shortlist was "they" to refer to an individual of unspecified gender.  I've been arguing for years that this definition should be recognized because as a culture we've been using for as long as I can remember.  "They" is not only a real word, it's been in use for much longer -- emoji were first available English speakers (adopted from the Japanese) in 2000, but only really became popular in the last few years.

As with last year, this year's recognition feels like a bunch of lexicographers that are trying hard to be relevant in word that increasingly doesn't care about them ... and it's actually working.  I just wrote an entire blog post ranting about how stupid their decision was, but would I have done so if they had chosen "they" like I wanted?  Maybe, but I'm an English nerd.  I'm betting that this year's word got a lot of people talking, though I'd guess most of it was negative.  If the OED was going by the mantra "there's no such thing as bad publicity," then I guess they accomplished their goal.

But it's still stupid.