I’m not sure whether the latest news out of Oxford is a good thing for technophiles or a sign of the downfall of society and the English language as a whole.

Oxford Dictionaries has named “selfie” as their word of the year for 2013.

In late August, the Oxford Dictionaries announced that selfie was going to be added to the famous dictionary. Just over two months later, selfie went from recent addition to Word of the Year.

Sure, the word of the year award is a fictitious PR stunt and it’s accomplishing its goal well because a number of mainstream outlets (and even this humble little geek blog) are covering this but it does show the evolution of the English language.

Whether old folks or old-young folks (such as myself) like it, new words that have seemingly no meaning are entering our lexicon. I don’t understand the selfie phenomenon but selfies are a very popular thing. How many pictures on your Facebook and Twitter feeds are selfies? Naming selfie as Word of the Year is really just an acknowledgement of where the English language and modern society are heading. It’s not an assault on the English language as much as some of us may want to believe.

So put down your torches, pitchforks and claims of vocabucide. Whether we like it or not, words like this are going to become more common before they disappear.

Source: Oxford Dictionaries