Old Reliables

Hi everybody...so, over the weekend, I was listening to the WNYC radio show On the Media.  They were doing an interview [audio link] with the editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary, talking about their 2005 Word of the Year which was... podcast.

Of course, they have a blog, where they talk about the full list of Word of the Year candidates and more.

Anyway,
since the year is wrapping up (so to speak), we're about to head into a
deluge of year-end lists, covering the "Best of", "Worst of" and
everything in between.

I'm not going to do a roundup of wrapups, but I did take the opportunity to go through some of my bookmarks and pick out some of the "old reliables" -- annual features that your hear about, um, every year:

* Banished Words List
The
full name of this list is the "List of Words Banished from the Queen’s
English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness."  The 2005 edition includes blog, though, so something must be out of whack, as we know that nothing about blogs can be overused or overhyped.

The list is announced in December, and submissions are accepted year-round.

* Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Honoring
(or at least commemorating) the author of the infamous opening lines,
"It was a dark and stormy night" (which, in and of itself, isn't a bad
opening -- unfortunately, the opening sentence goes on... and on...),
this contest solicits for the worst possible opening sentence for a
novel. Actually, I guess it's the opening sentence for the worst
possible novel.



Fortunately, entrants don't have to write the rest of the novel.

Submissions are accepted year-round; the official deadline for current year entries is...sometime between April and June, and the fresh batch is announced in the summer.

* Beloit College Mindset List
This one comes out in August, just before the new crop of college freshpersons hits campus. It's a thoroughly depressing
list of all the things that were a big deal at the time, but that the
incoming frosh now take for granted as "always been that way" (e.g.
"Incoming freshman were born in 1987 and never known a world without
fire.")... if they have any idea at all what you're talking about
("2400 baud modem? Oh, yeah, I saw that in a museum!").

* Bad Sex in Fiction
Keep
the kids away from this one... but only because we don't want to scare
them into thinking that these literary selections are what it's all
about. The UK's Literary Review's annual list of bad sex writing comes out in December; Tom Wolfe won/lost this year's contest.

Oh,
you actually want to read the bad sex? Fortunately, the UK's Guardian
Newspaper has the winning passages, which I am deliberately going to
make hard to click so you don't click it "accidentally": *. [Link Content Warning:
while it's bad sex, it's still sex, so don't click the link if it will
offend you, either because it's sex or because it's poorly written.]

* Plain English Awards
Another one from the UK, this one is from the Plain English Campaign, which highlights the most obfuscated, double-talked, non-utterances made by a public figure.

On
a side note, a previous winner was Donald Rumsfeld, though I thought it
was kind of unfair, as his winning statement actually made sense if you
think about it for a moment:

"Reports that say that
something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we
know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also
know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some
things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones
we don't know we don't know."

* Worst Movies of 2005
My last pick is pretty straightforward -- at first. It's a list of the worst flicks of 2005, courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes, though that's whyit's a bit more interesting than your typical critic's list.

Rotten
Tomatoes is kind of a movie-review aggregator/community site that takes
the reviews from "Approved Tomatometer Critics", who are all accredited critics, and then shakes out an overall rating. It's a good way to see opinions about a movie across a diverse range of critics.

If
you've got your own favorite regular yearly feature, feel free to share
with the rest of the class in the comments.  Thanks -- Joe