It’s time to look at the words that made the news last year.

Forget twerking, and stop taking selfies, because this year’s winner was truly momentous.

There’s even someone special to take us through it: Ben Zimmer of the American Dialect Society talks to our resident linguist Daniel Midgley on this episode of Talk the Talk.


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147: Words of the Year 2013 (featuring Ben Zimmer)

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You can listen to all the episodes of Talk the Talk by pasting this URL into your podlistener.

http://danielmidgley.com/talkthetalk/talk_classic.xml

Promo

Promo with James Hall, 2014-01-21: WotY 2013

Bonus audio

Bonus audio with James Hall, 2014-01-07

Show notes

Here are all the words:
http://www.americandialect.org/because-is-the-2013-word-of-the-year

Because was the clear winner.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/01/08/the-absolute-final-last-word-of-the-year-because/

Feel like sitting in on the voting? Here’s the video of all the shenanigans at the American Dialect Society.

Catch up with Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

Tyler Schnoebelen of Idibon determines the value of X for ‘because X’ tweets.
http://idibon.com/innovating-innovation/

Twerk should be in the dictionary.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/09/04/twerk_definition_of_course_it_s_a_real_word_and_of_course_it_should_be_in.html

Selfie was huge, too.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/11/19/selfie-australian-slang-term-named-international-word-year

The Selfie Olympics
https://imgur.com/a/deovZ?gallery

Catfish
http://www.capthemagazine.com/catfish/

Such doge. Wow.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/31/5248762/doge-meme-rescue-dog-wow

The schmefix
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/003104.html/

The Internet K-Hole
http://internetkhole.blogspot.com.au/