Words of the Year

Back in November, when the Oxford Dictionary folks selected Selfie as the Word of the Year, I considered posting on the subject.   Selfie isn’t a word, I might have said, it’s slang.  And juvenile slang at that.  Then I Googled Oxford Word of the Year.  It turns out that the runner up for 2013 Word of the Year was twerking.   For 2012 it was omnishambles (what the hell?).  2011 – squeezed middle (ditto).  Hmmm.  A little research revealed that the Oxford word of the year is based on its coming into prominent usage in the past year AND that there is no assurance that the Word of the Year will be added to the Oxford Dictionary.   That made me feel better.  Then I saw the picture of the president of the United States posing for a Selfie with with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt … at the memorial service for Nelson Mandella.  I’m not picking on Mr.Obama.  He is a product of his times and his generation and it beats the hell out of sex games with a cigar and an intern in the Oval Office.  But it did make me wonder if Selfie isn’t in fact the perfect word to describe the state of the species in 2013.