NEW YORK — Thanks to the election, socialism and capitalism are forever wed as Merriam-Webster’s most looked-up words of 2012.
Traffic for the unlikely pair on the company’s website about doubled this year from the year before as the health care debate heated up and discussion intensified over “American capitalism” versus “European socialism,” said the editor at large, Peter Sokolowski.
The choice revealed Wednesday was “kind of a no-brainer,” he said. The side-by-side interest among political candidates and around kitchen tables prompted the dictionary folk to settle on two words of the year rather than one for the first time since the accolade began in 2003.
“They’re words that sort of encapsulate the zeitgeist. They’re words that are in the national conversation,” said Sokolowski from company headquarters in Springfield, Mass. “The thing about an election year is it generates a huge amount of very specific interest.”
Democracy, globalization, marriage and bigot — all touched by politics — made the Top 10, in no particular order. The latter two were driven in part by the fight for same-sex marriage acceptance.
Last year’s word of the year was austerity. Before that, it was pragmatic. Other words in the leading dictionary maker’s Top 10 for 2012 were also politically motivated.
Harken back to Oct. 11, when Vice President Joe Biden tangled with Mitt Romney running mate Paul Ryan in a televised debate focused on foreign policy — terror attacks, defense spending and war, to be specific.
“With all due respect, that’s a bunch of MALARKEY,” declared Biden during a particularly tough row with Ryan. The mention sent look-ups of malarkey soaring on Merriam-webster.com, Sokolowski said, adding: “Clearly a one-week wonder, but what a week!”
Actually, it was more like what a day. Look-ups of malarkey represented the largest spike of a single word on the website by percentage, at 3,000 percent, in a single 24-hour period this year. The company won’t release the number of page views per word but said the site gets about 1.2 billion overall each year.
Malarkey, with the alternative spelling of “y” at the end, is of unknown origin, but Merriam-Webster surmises it’s more Irish-American than Irish, tracing it to newspaper references as far back as 1929.
Beyond “nonsense,” malarkey can mean “insincere or pretentious talk or writing designed to impress one and usually to distract attention from ulterior motives or actual conditions,” noted Sokolowski.
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