Without searching very hard, it’s possible to find many supposed awards bestowed on people and things.<\/p>\n
Sports Illustrated treated LeBron James, the superstar of the often-luckless Cleveland Cavaliers to virtually its entire issue. It is true: LeBron is great, his having led his team to a national basketball championship (but the honor should have gone instead to Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors).<\/p>\n
But let’s leave this session of “Coaches’ Corner.” The “award” I refer to now is what Mirriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher, calls the “Word of the Year.” That term, especially the “of the year” phrase must denote something special, along the lines of Man (or Woman or invention) of the Year, an honor bestowed by Newsweek or Time.<\/p>\n
Before revealing that magnificent word, which some readers may already have learned about, let’s discus a few items that should be criteria for such a selection:<\/p>\n
Things like the cell phone \u00e2\u20ac\u201d which I am convinced every person on the planet owns \u00e2\u20ac\u201d is an incredible invention, whose guts, contained in a unit thinner than a pack of cigarettes, contain more technology than some of those supercomputers that needed an entire building to contain them.<\/p>\n
Now that could be dubbed “The Invention of the Decade (or Century).<\/p>\n
Or the qualifying for the post-season, by my Oakland Raiders \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that too could qualify for the “of the year” honors.<\/p>\n
But instead, the Word of the Year, as determined by the folks at Mirriam-Webster, is “surreal.”
\n“Surreal”? Why that? No drumroll.<\/p>\n
A different dictionary defines “surreal” as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153strange, esp. because of combining items that are never found together in reality.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And the same source uses the word in the context of a song by Ayumi Hamasaki, an album by Man Raze or in numbers: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A superset of the real numbers in mathematics.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And ‘surreal” is even the name of a video game.<\/p>\n
My question, which I hope some reader will help me fully understand, has to do with how the M-W folks chose such a word.<\/p>\n
An explanatory paragraph on the M-W website, says, “Historically, ‘surreal’ has been one of the words most searched after tragedy, most notably in the days following 9\/11. But it was associated with a wide variety of stories this year,” according to Peter Sokolowski, of M-W.<\/p>\n
He adds that tragedies, or unexplained events usually cause people to search for full definitions to explain things. The dictionary says a big spike in searches for “surreal” came after Donald Trump’s presidential election win in November.<\/p>\n
And it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy to understand why. As I lay my head upon my cot, listening to November\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s general election results, I dozed off with Hillary in the lead but awoke to a victory celebration for Trump.<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s possible the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153surreal\u00e2\u20ac\u009d came to mind as I backed up my TIVO, hoping to change the result. But this Monday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s official allotment of electoral votes to Trump sealed the victory for the billionaire.<\/p>\n
Also in the running for Word of the year was “fascism.” The Mirriam-Webster website explains that the selection of the year’s word comes in part from events in the news that cause people to look up certain words that suddenly become popular.<\/p>\n
Curious about other words in the top ten list? They are, in no particular order, revenant, icon, bigly, deplorable, irregardless, feckless and a couple of arcane Latin terms.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Feckless,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by the way, refers to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lacking initiative or strength of character.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Would a young driver, trembling behind the wheel, ever be charged with feckless driving?<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Often, when people are unhappy with the result, they strive to have it rescinded \u00e2\u20ac\u201d somehow. Take the recent General Election in which Donald Trump won more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton but still received fewer of the popular votes. Those things happen, much of them determined by how people voted in particular states. The more populous states naturally have more electoral votes than states like ours, which has five. The electoral college specifies that the winner of the popular vote in each state receive ALL the electoral votes.<\/p>\n
There’s much grumbling as to the “unfairness” of the election results and even threats to try to change the results.<\/p>\n
Even though I voted for Clinton, making sure I put extra pressure on the paper ballot as I cast it for her, I believe it’s wrong to try to change the rules after the game is played. Those unhappy with the fact that a candidate can win one kind of vote and lose the other ought to fight to change the law \u00e2\u20ac\u201d for the next election, not for this one.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Ray Litherland, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the banker with a heart of gold,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d passed away last week. For me the loss is quite personal. When I began writing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Work of Art,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in 2003, I wrote something about scams that a couple of locals called me about. They suggested I write something about it.<\/p>\n
That week, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d received a collect call from a Spanish-speaking woman who explained that a family member, with the same name as my REAL sister, Dorothy, had been detained, and possibly arrested in some Mexican town and only a money order from me could spring her.<\/p>\n
It didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take long to suspect the caller had the wrong Dorothy in mind, but by the time I snapped, the four-minutes I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d spent on the phone cost me $13.50 a minute, for a total of $54.<\/p>\n
Ray Litherland read that column and soon sent me several pages of warnings bank officials receive regarding fraud. I used some of those items in later columns.<\/p>\n
And I told him several times how much the public must have appreciated his input.
\nI appreciate and miss him.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. And you probably recall the most famous reindeer of all, Rudolph. But there’s STILL another reindeer, the 10th one, who rode along on Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n
What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the tenth reindeer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name, readers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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