rtant gaps in the English language. But how real are they if we use them primarily as slang and they don't yet appear in a dictionary? With that, let's turn to dictionaries. I'm going to do this as a show of hands: How many of you still regularly refer to a dictionary, either print or online? Okey, so that looks like most of you. Now, a se買粉絲nd question. Again, a show of hands: How many of you have ever looked to see who edited the dictionary you are using? Okey, many fewer. 

At some level, we know that there are human hands behind dictionaries, but we are really not sure who those hands belong to. I'm actually fascinated by this. Even the most critical people out there, tend not to be very critical about dictionaries, not distinguishing among them and not asking a whole lot of questions about who edited them. Just think about the phrase ' Look it up in the dictionary,' which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same. Consider the library here on campus, where you go into the reading room, and there is a large, unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and resect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers. Now, don't get me wrong, dictionaries are fantastic resources, but they are human and they are not timeless. I am struck as a teacher that we tell students to critically question every text they read, every website they visit, except dictionaries, which we tend to treat as un-authored, as if they came nowhere to give us answers about what words really mean.

Here's the thing: If you ask dictionary editors, what they will tell you is they're just trying to keep up with us as we change the language. That are watching what we say and what we write and trying to figure out what 's going to stick and what's not going to stick. They have to gamble, because they want to appear cutting edge and catch the wards that are going to make it, such as LOL, but they don't want to appear faddish and include the words that aren't going to make it, and I think a word that they are watching right now is YOLO, you only live once. Now I get to hang out with dictionary editors, and you might be surprised by one of the places where we hang out. Every January, we go to the American Dialect Society annual meeting, where among other things, we vote on the word of the year. There are about 200 or 300 people who 買粉絲e, some of the best known linguists in the United States. To give you a sense of the flavor of the meeting, it occurs right before happy hour. Anyone who 買粉絲es can vote. The most important rule is that you can vote with 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 pr