Sydney, Australia (February, 2006) Global Language Monitor releases another press release.
I was browsing the Language Log (as you do) today and I saw a link to the “Global Language Monitor” site. I don’t know who this Payack guy is, but this is a weird site. I was just reading through the front page, and it looks like all of the posts are formulated as press releases but I don’t know where he’s pulling his “data” from...
From his list of “Top Words of 2006” (what’s a “top word” anyway?) apparently number 4 is:
Planemo -- Planets that didn’t make the cut in 2006 as sustainable planets. Pluto was demoted to a planemo.
Which is odd, because “planemo” is a contraction of “planetary mass object” and according to the wikipedia, is basically every object bigger than an asteroid and smaller than a star. So not only is Pluto “demoted” to a planemo, but so is Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Even stranger, according to that self-same wikipedia entry, the word “planemo” hasn’t really caught on at all – it can be found in four (count ‘em, four) papers in the astro-ph archive – not a “top word” by many people’s definition...
By the way, the rather oddball use of the word “sustainable” seems to come from his #1 “top word” for 2006, “sustainable.” It seems that the “Global Language Monitor” has decided that the definition of “sustainable” has moved from being a “green” term (funny, I thought it was the adjective form of “sustain” but what do I know?) to meaning “self-generating” as in “wind power is a sustainable power supply.” But I don’t see where the jump from that sentence to the “self-generating” definition comes from. Wind power is certainly not “self-generating” (after all, you get no power if there’s no wind!). I wonder, does this “self-generating” definition also apply to sustainable populations, marriages, agriculture and economics? How is sustainable agriculture “self-generating”? Livestock give birth the same way whether you’re raising them sustainably or not... actually, let’s not go there.
All in all, a very strange web site. |-|