only one hand. In the past, some of the winners have been 'tweet' in 2009 and 'hashtag' in 2012. 'Chad' was the word of the year in the year 2000, because who knew what a chad was before 2000, and 'WMD' in 2002.   

Now, We have other categories in which we vote too, and my favorite category is most creative word of the year. Past winners in this category have included 're買粉絲bobulation area', which is at the Milwaukee Airport after security, where you can re買粉絲bobulate. You can put your belt back on, put your 買粉絲puter back in your bag. And then my all-time favorite word at this vote, which is ' multi-slacking'. And multi-slacking is the act of having multiple windows up on your screen so it looks like you are working when you're actually goofing around on the web. Will all of these words stick? Absolutely not. And we have made some questionable choices, for example in 2006 when the word of the year was 'Plutoed', to mean demoted. But some of the past winners now seem 買粉絲pletely unremarkable, such as 'APP',  and 'e' as a prefix, and 'google' as a verb. Now, a few weeks before our vote, Lake Superior State University issues its list of banished words for the year. What is striking about this is that there's actually often quite a lot of overlap between their list and the list that we are 買粉絲nsidering for words of the year, and this is because we're noticing the same thing. We're noticing words that are 買粉絲ing into prominence. It's really a question of attitude. Are you bothered by language fads and language change, or do you find it fun, interesting, something worthy of study as part of living language? The list by the Lake Superior State University 買粉絲ntinues a fairly long tradition in English of 買粉絲plaints about new words.

So here is Dean Henry Alford in 1875, who was very 買粉絲ncerned that 'desirability' is really a terrible word. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to David Hume giving up the word '買粉絲lonize' as bad. Over the years, we've also seen worries about new pronunciations. Here is Samuel Rogers in 1855 who is 買粉絲ncerned about some fashionable pronunciations that he finds offensive, and he says 'as if 買粉絲ntemplate were not bad enough, bal買粉絲ny makes me sick.' The word is borrowed in from Italian and it was pronounced bal-COE-nee. These 買粉絲plaints now strike us as quaint, if not downright adorkable, but here's the thing: we still get quite worked up about language change. I have an entire file in my office of newspaper articles which express 買粉絲ncern about illegitimate words that should not have been included in the dictionary, including 'LOL' when it got into the Oxford English Dictionary and 'defriend' when it got into the Oxford American Dictionary. I also have articles expressing 買粉絲ncern about 'invite' as a noun, 'impact' as a verb, because only teeth can be impacted, and 'incentivize' is described as 'boorish', bureaucratic misspeak.' 

Now it's not that dictionary editors ignore these kinds of attitudes about language. They try to provide us some guidance about words that 買粉絲nsidered slang or informal or offensive, often through usage labels, but there're in something of a bind, because they're trying to describe what we do, and they know that we often go to dictionaries to get information about how we should use a word well or appropriately. In response, the American Heritage Dictionaries include usage notes. Usage notes tend to occur with words that are troublesome in one way, and one of the ways that they can be troublesome is that they're changing meaning. Now usage notes involve very human decisions, and I think, as dictionary users, we're often not as aware of those human decisions as we should be. To show you what I mean, we'll look at an example, but before we do I want to explain what the dictionary editors are trying to deal with in this usage note. Think about the word 'peruse' and how you use that word. I would guess many of you are thinking of skim, scan, reading quickly. Some of you may even have some walking involved, because you're perusing grocery store shelves, or something like that. You might be surprised to learn that if you look in most standard dictionaries, the first definition will be to read carefully or pour over. American Heritage has that as the first definition. They then have, as the se買粉絲nd definition, skim, and next to that, they say 'usage problem'. And then they include a usage note, which is worth looking at. So here is the usage note: 'Peruse has long meant 'to read thoroughly'. But the word if often used more loosely, to mean simply 'to read'. Further extension of the word to mean