Blogfinger

By Charles Layton

The Blogfinger Grammarian makes no apology for being totally out of it.

He does not apologize for the fact that his fashion consciousness is about the same as it was in high school. Nor for the fact that, of all the performers at the Bamboozle music festival, the only one he’d heard of was Bon Jovi. Nor for the fact that he doesn’t know who the Kardashians are, has never once watched American Idol, and has never heard Lady Gaga sing.

He no longer follows any sports teams except the Lakewood Blueclaws, having decided that performance-enhancing drugs, money, television, childishly egotistical acting-out and pedophilia have made big-time sports unworthy of serious attention.

When the Blogfinger Grammarian passes the magazine racks at the Wegmans checkout counter, he doesn’t recognize any of the celebrities on the covers (except for Brad and Jen, whom he does kind of hope may one day get back together, although he knows they never will).

Being ignorant of so many cultural references, the Blogfinger Grammarian no longer gets half the jokes on Saturday Night Live, and so he doesn’t watch it any more. (He wishes Chevy Chase and Dan Ackroyd would come back, although he knows that would be a disaster.)

However, one thing that I (let’s drop the third-person affectation) do know something about is the English language, since I made my living off of it. At least I thought I knew the English language; I thought I knew words.

But now I’ve just read that the Oxford American Dictionary has announced its annual “word of the year,” and it is a word I’d never heard of. The dictionary claims that its word of the year is chosen for being “a word that has attracted interest and that embodies in some way the ethos of the year.” Well if that’s true, I must have wandered right out of the ethos and right into the anti-ethos.

Because the word of the year is – ta-daaah! – GIF.

But not GIF as a noun – that’s supposedly old-hat. What’s new and exciting, according to Oxford American, is that people are now using GIF as a verb. To GIF means to perform the act of creating a GIF. Or posting a GIF online, or something.

This is a travesty. In the first place, show of hands, how many of you know what the heck a GIF is, or what the verb “to GIF” means? If you were asked to GIF, what would you do? (It’s pronounced with a soft “g,” by the way, as in “giant.”)

I looked it up. Turns out the letters stand for Graphics Interchange Format. And a GIF is a series of images put together via computer in a short, loop-repeating sequence.

Here’s a link. Check out a few GIFs and then hit the back arrow and come on back.

Back now?

OK. Although GIFs are empty calories, they can be kind of fun. They’re all over the Internet. People share them in emails.

Still, if I’d had a vote I certainly would not have supported GIF as word of the year. Just because some Internet geeks with too much time on their hands started using it as a verb? Please.

Some of the other choices Oxford American considered but turned down seem way more appealing to me. They turned down “Super PAC,” which has the advantage that you hear and read that word constantly. It really is part of the ethos of the year 2012. So is “superstorm,” but the judges passed on that one as well.

 “Malarkey” was even a contender, because Joe Biden used it in the debate with Paul Ryan. It has been reported that moments after Biden said “That’s a bunch of malarkey” people on the Internet went wild appreciating the word, discussing its meaning, its derivation, variations on its spelling. Malarkey reportedly was mentioned on Twitter 30,000 times in one minute.

It’s a good word. A great word. Maybe not deserving to be anyone’s word of the year, but it beats the heck out of GIF.

Can I please get an amen on that?

MUSIC by Ella Fitzgerald: