I recently ran across the New York Times’ take on the buzz words of 2007. Generally speaking, I loathe those end of year compilations that crop up all over the place as we near the end of December, but this one caught my eye. (It was written by Grant Barrett and illustrated by Rick Valicenti.) Here’s an excerpt, but click thru for the full article.

New words are most happily received when they arrive without fanfare. On the other hand, when we revel in new words it’s often for the little jokes and puns implanted by their coiners. We delight in coining them, too, especially goofy throwaway blends in which two words combine syllables and meanings to make one. A large part of the delight derives from the re-orientation that new words make possible. They are fantastical transportation—portkeys and improbability starships—into other cultures, workplaces, minds.
If you work in fields like politics, soldiering, science or technology, areas that frequently send new words bubbling up into the mainstream, it can seem strange to hear a normal day’s vocabulary talked about as if it were a novelty. The incongruity can bring a sense of deja fatigue, the stage beyond deja vu: you’ve not only seen it before, but it hardly seems worth remarking upon. It’s ordinary.