Maybe people on Twitter are “not normal”, as TechCrunch writes, but the site has already had a huge impact. In an annual survey by the Global Language Monitor of the top words among 1.58 billion English-language speakers, Twitter came out on top in 2009. Twitter was followed by Obama, H1N1, Stimulus, Vampire, the suffix 2.0, Deficit, Hadron, Healthcare, and Transparency.
“In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the after effects of a financial tsunami and the death of a revered pop icon, the word Twitter stands above all the other words. Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters,” said Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor.
I don’t know what it says about the world, but this year’s winner is quite different from several of the previous top words.
2008: Change
2007: Hybrid (representing all things green)
2006: Sustainable
2005: Refugee
2004: Incivility (for inCivil War)
2003: Embedded
2002: Misunderestimate
2001: GroundZero
2000: Chad