As we’re charging our glasses this New Year’s Eve, and mulling over an extraordinary year—a year of civil war and uncivil strife, of natural disasters and unnatural acts of violence—we should spare a thought for the good men and women of the American Dialect Society, whose mission it is to select just one word from the multitudinous melting pot of English that will stand as a monument to this turbulent twelve months. Inaugurated in 1991, the ADS’s word of the year has been dominated in recent times by coinages of a technological nature. In 2010 ‘app’ took the honours, while in 2009 the laurels fell to ‘tweet’. Nominations for the word of the decade showed a similarly hi-tech bias. ‘Blog’ and ‘wi-fi’ both made the shortlist, while the winner, ‘google’ (the verb, not the noun), looks perfectly at home next to its predecessor, ‘web’.

Needless to say, these words are all neologisms, which perhaps tells us something interesting about our love of, or addiction to, the new. But according to the ADS’s guidelines, the word of the year doesn’t have to be new; it just has to be ‘newly prominent [and] indicative or reflective of the national discourse’. For that reason, I wonder if the ADS panel might dispense with its recent technophilia and pick instead an established word to which new meaning, or at least new force, would appear to be accruing every year. The word I have in mind is ‘offensive’.