With so much going on right now, Thanksgiving and gearing up for finals and everything else, I’d like to take a little break and talk about the English language. Not just because I’m an English major, but because recent events have piqued my interest and it involves English and our society as a whole. The Oxford Dictionary holds a contest of sorts, where they research and tally the words being used by people on a daily basis, calculating new words coming into existence and other words becoming part of the regular language nomenclature. And this year, the winner for the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year is ‘selfie.’ While I’m neither outraged nor glad by this decision, this result has interesting social and cultural ramifications.
Oxford Dictionary started their Word of the Year contest back in 2004, as the incredible growth of technology has allowed easier access to different forms of media and communication, as well as making it easier to tally different words being used across a plethora of multimedia publications and outlets. And as our communication has increasingly grown digital, the words that we use more and more reflect that growth. The 2005 Word of the Year, for example, was ‘podcast,’ the 2009 Word of the Year ‘unfriend,’ and the 2012 Word of the Year ‘GIF.’ So the inclusion of selfie to the Word of the Year list doesn’t seem as odd as it should. The use of these words shows just how much the Internet, Facebook, and other websites and their uses have driven certain words into ones we use almost on a daily basis.
Looking at the history of selfie, we can easily see its usage on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and many other places, as more people nowadays have access to smartphones with cameras. With the ability to take pictures at random, a lot of people are able to take selfies, and upload them onto the Internet or share them with friends. The first actual usage of selfie, according to Oxford Dictionary, took place back in 2002, where on an Australian online forum, a drunken user posted a picture and apologized for the lack of focus, claiming it was a selfie. And now that the word seems to have entered the everyday parlance for many people, its inclusion as the Word of the Year doesn’t seem all that hard to swallow.
As stated earlier, this decision provides some interesting insight into American society. With so many social media sites integrating the usage of smartphones, the ability with which people have to take pictures and share them online has become only that much easier. For better or worse, a lot of people now have the power to take pictures of themselves and put them on a place where everybody can see them. And the versatility selfies have now to be taken reflects its growing status as an everyday word; the first ever reported ‘Papal Selfie’ has been made, and once a word and its action enters the highest levels of a religious organization, than its pretty clear how much of an impact it has on society.
Sources:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year-faq/
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/11/word-of-the-year-2013-winner/