"Dude, I totally subprimed my NYRE exam..."

Earlier this year, the American Dialect Society (ADS) announced the winner of its 18th annual Word of the Year award at a catered affair in a subterranean “ballroom” at the Chicago Hilton.

The 2007 honoree was “subprime”, an adjective that over the past year has become many Americans’ shorthand description for shady mortgages that consumers agree to because lenders deliberately minimize the appearance of risk.

Reincarnated as a verb, “to subprime” has come to mean to devastate or destroy something or “to tank” as in to fail completely, especially at great cost.

Subprime declined to make an acceptance speech in deference to the striking writers whose unflagging commitment to the fuelling of hysteria to the point of numb complacency guaranteed subprime’s ubiquity in lexical pop culture.

2007 Word of the Year also-rans include:

Googlegänger: A person with your name who shows up when you google yourself.

Wide stance, to have a: To be hypocritical or to express two conflicting points of view. [When Senator Larry Craig was arrested in a public restroom and accused of making signals with his foot that police said meant he was in search of a anonymous sex, Craig said it was a misunderstanding and that he just had a wide stance when using the toilet.]

For the complete list of winners dating back to 1990, please see the ADS’s press release for the 2007 Word of the Year.