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'05's heckuva word.
Byline: Amy S. Rosenberg
Jan. 5--And so they will gather again, with nominating slates and campaigns, speeches and votes. They are the American Dialect Society -- the nation's wordinistas, as Stephen Colbert would say -- and they will attempt, at tomorrow's conclave in Albuquerque, N.M., to sum up 2005 in a word (or two).
Some years, they do better than others. The 2004 winner was red state/blue state/purple state, which already seems a bit stale. But Grant Barrett, one of the society's high-definition priests and project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, notes that the political connotations still linger in the colors (and have overtaken communist and blue-collar).
In 2003, the word of the year was metrosexual, which seems to have stuck. The year before, it was weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, or maybe, in retrospect, it wasn't. This is not to be confused with this year's UMD, or universal media disc, which of …
