Once again, I am having my undergraduates in my intermediate linguistic anthro class at Wayne State pick from a curated list of fun, interesting, socially relevant, or just plain wacky words for their original research papers this term. The Lexiculture project teaches a dollop of research methods, a touch of discourse analysis, a dab of corpus linguistics, and a soupcon of linguistic anthropology as the student-researchers investigate the sociocultural context and relevance of a single English word.
Earlier this year I edited 62 student papers written from 2013-2020 into an open-access ebook, The Lexiculture Papers: English Words and Culture. Check it out – I’m exceptionally proud of this collection of student scholarship.
And for those interested, here’s the list my students are choosing from this year:
| all in | dingus | make-or-break | sellout |
| all out | djent | man cave | shoo-in |
| Amerindian | doggone | Mohammedan | shout out |
| amp up | druthers | moron | slider |
| backpedal | fast forward | next-level | snuck |
| baloney | finalize | no-brainer | stalemate |
| bejesus | gateway | NSFW | stalker |
| bidet | geezer | nth | stat |
| biohazard | get-go | nuke | suplex |
| blessed | grassroots | octoroon | swiff |
| brain trust | halfsies | often | switcheroo |
| business end | hardwired | peopling | tardy |
| buzzkill | has-been | phase out | thunk |
| call dibs | hookup | porridge | touchless |
| canola | hyphenated | pronto | underprivileged |
| car phone | Information Superhighway | psychobabble | unmentionables |
| card-carrying | jailbait | rando | upside the head |
| centric | jazz hands | realsies | upsize |
| challenged | jinx | realtime | whole nother |
| cluster | jock | reboot | wingnut |
| coed | kewl | recap | workshop |
| columbused | lavender | runner-up | yea big |
| crib | majorly | scooch |
Any favourites you’d really like to see picked this year?
Glossographia 