The Selfish “Selfie”?

Different dictionaries have identified different choices as “Word of the Year” for 2013. Merriam Webster, America’s leading dictionary publisher, has announced its top ten words of the year based on the top look-ups in its online dictionary, Merriam-webster.com. The words are quite mundane: “science”, “cognitive”, “rapport”, “communication”, “niche”, etc. More interesting is the Collins Word of the Year - “geek”, not in the old sense of a boring unsociable nerd, but in the new sense of “a person who is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a specific subject” (a little broader than the 2003 definition focusing on a preoccupation with computing). The evolution of this word shows just how fluid the language is – how fast it is evolving.

For Dictionary.com, the Word of the Year is an old word with growing importance: “privacy”! From airport body scanners to global spying and corporations accessing user data, privacy has become a huge concern globally, triggering an open letter by fifty prominent writers urging the United Nations to establish an international bill of digital rights.

Most interestingly, according to the Oxford Dictionaries Online Blog, “selfie” is the word of the year, reminding us that “A picture can paint a thousand words”. While the word is not very new, having been “on the radar” for quite a while, it became popular in 2013. Besides, as the blog notes, “It seems like everyone who is anyone has posted a selfie somewhere on the Internet. If it is good enough for the Obamas or The Pope, then it is good enough for Word of the Year.” The dictionary blog notes that while self-portraits are not new historically, technology has made them much easier; the word was first spotted on an Australian online forum in 2002, after which it gradually gained some currency on social networking forums such as Flickr and MySpace before becoming most prominent in the last year or two. The blog also points out a promising feature of the word – its linguistic productivity; take for instance “helfie” (a picture of one’s hair), “welfie” (a workout selfie) and drelfie (a drunken selfie).

I wish my readers a successful new year, with lots of selfies, welfies, etc. After all, selfies are not necessarily as selfish as they sound!