‘Serious fellows, these Americans,’ said my husband, applying stereotypes with a broad, patronising brush. He had a point, though, for Merriam-Webster’s, the dictionary people, announced that their word of the year, 2012, was a dead heat between socialism and capitalism. ‘We saw a huge spike for socialism on election day,’ said one of its editors. ‘Lookups of one word often led to lookups of the other.’ Lookups, eh? Like pressups, cockups and kneesups?
These lookups are online clicks. It is odd to think that undecided voters should have been swayed by reading a short definition of socialism.
Back in Blighty, Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year was omnishambles, about which I wrote on 28 April. So while Americans were studiously checking the meaning of socialism, the British were merrily parroting a word popularised by television satire (The Thick of It).
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