Words

Whether you're partnered, solo, or something in-between, this Valentine's Day expect men to be a little more chivalrous than every other day of the year. At least French men!

Scientists at a French university hypothesized that words can unconsciously affect behavior, so they set up a test with the word "valentine" in the French city of Vannes. A 19-year-old asked 120 men, between 30 and 50, where nonexistent streets were: half the time she asked where Valentine St. was, and the rest of the time she asked where Martin St. was.

Just 100 feet away (that would make me suspicious), another 19-year-old woman asked for help, saying her phone was stolen by a group of four 20-year-olds. The men who were asked where "Valentine St." was were almost twice as likely to help than those who were asked where Martin St. was.

"After they heard the word 'valentine,' male passersbys may have had in mind, without being conscious of it, the idea of love," said Lubomir Lamy, a social psychologist at the University of Paris-Sud in France, " which in turn may activate the passerby's willingness to give help, which is an aspect of love."

Whether it's n'importe quoi or actual science, I say enjoy today. Maybe you'll be the beneficiary of a modern-day gentleman's word association!

There are so many perfect and weird words to describe complicated emotions in other languages that I wish someone would go on a crusade to educate everyone. I went through a few hundred words with no direct English translation, which oddly there seems to be no word for. Perhaps Jeffrey Eugenides explained it best in Middlesex.

Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." … I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar."

Ahh, yes, the Germans seem to do it best. My favorite so far is "handschuhschneeballwerfer," which is German for coward, and literally means one who wears gloves to throw snowballs. And while that could feasibly be used to describe a guy, here are 15 words we could use while dating in the English language.

1. Koi no yokan: Japanese for the feeling that a relationship will evolve into love after the first meeting.
2. Nedotipva: Czech for one who finds it difficult to take the hint.
3. Mahj: Persian for looking beautiful after a disease.
4. Spesenritter: German for a person who shows off by paying the bill on his company's money.
5. Prozvonit: Czech and Slovak for calling someone's cell so they have your number.

Get the other 10 below

If Google Books' Ngram Viewer is any indication, sex may surpass love in popularity. Literary popularity, at least.

According to Google's new research tool, which tracks words and phrases across more than five million books, the word "love" has been dropping in popularity over the past 200 years, before plateauing slightly above "sex" around 1980. Speaking of 1980, that's the year "feminism" skyrocketed past "housewife," and "marry" lost out to "divorce." Maybe that's when our interest in divorce porn began? And although we are all fascinated with virginity, the actual word has stayed consistently low compared to "sexuality," which started climbing around 1940. And how about the whole "single" vs. "unmarried" debate? Well, it was a close call until around 1970, when "single women" became more popular than "unmarried women."

See the charts below, and let me know if you've discovered any great comparisons on the tool in the comments!

From the Jersey Shore-derived "guido" to the World Cup-inspired "vuvuzela," suggestions have been rolling in for what 2010's word of the year should be. Urban Dictionary suggests the not-so-tasteful "gate rape" for the TSA's new stringent airport checks, New Oxford American Dictionary named the Sarah Palin-coined "refudiate" 2010's word, and the Global Language Monitor chose "spillcam," after the live feed that recorded the Gulf oil spill.

Whether one of these, or one of your own, what do you think the word of the year should be?

Source: Flickr User nicolasnova

I admit, I say it. Not in a pathological, valley-girl way, but in a casual, filler way. Sometimes it's unconscious, a nervous tick, and other times it punctuates a thought and just sounds right. It's easy, it's colloquial, and it's so widespread that I thought nobody cared anymore. After all, this is a language where BFF can make it into the dictionary!

But this week actress Emma Thompson brought "like" back into the negative spotlight when she lamented that teenagers need to avoid saying it around older, authority figures. Does it even have anything to do with youth at this point? Aren't the teenagers who made it mainstream in the early '80s now in their, like, 40s?

There are several grammatically incorrect ways to use like, but that doesn't make them uncommon. It can indicate exaggeration, as I did above ("in their, like, 40s"); be used to introduce a quote ("she was like"); or signify a gesture, facial expression, or sound ("it was like"). But nowhere is it more common than as a filler (as in "um" or "ah" or "like"), and fillers are nothing new.

John Ayto, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, said fillers are not lazy or sloppy, or a sign of approaching end-times for the English language. "We all use fillers because we can't keep up highly monitored, highly grammatical language all the time," he said. "We all have to pause and think." In fact, Anglo Saxons probably did the same thing.

The reason people like Thompson get so upset with the use of "like" as a filler is because, unlike "um" and "ah," it's an actual word. And if there's one thing word traditionalists don't like, it's when words find breakout success by using themselves in entirely new ways.

I say as long as it's not, like, every other word out of your mouth, you're OK.

Bromance and chillax may be on Lake Superior State University's 2010 list of words that should be banned, but the OED added them to its massive vault of words for the ages anyway.

Today the definitive tome added 39 words to its collection. Some seem right on (vuvuzela) while others sound like they've been stuck in the word-hopeful pile for years (wardrobe malfunction, buzzkill, chill pill), and most are sure to create controversy among people who get upset about words.

Here are 10 useful and ridiculous ones to know.

• Catastrophizing: view or present a situation as considerably worse than it actually is.
• Overthink: think about (something) too much or for too long.
• Matchy-matchy: excessively color coordinated.
• LBD: little black dress
• Frenemy: a person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry.
• Cool hunter: a person whose job it is to make observations or predictions about new styles and trends.
• Bromance: a close but nonsexual relationship between two men.
• Exit strategy: a preplanned means of extricating oneself from a situation.
• Defriend: another term for unfriend (remove someone from a list of friends or contacts on a social networking site).
• Soft skills: personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.

Source: Flickr User Adventures in Librarianship

Should "tanorexia" really be added to the Oxford English Dictionary? Probably not, even though it's been submitted for possible inclusion. Like the words that define a decade, many neologisms that seem very important at the time could sound quite silly later.

Hence, Oxford's "vault" full of words submitted for possible inclusion but not deemed worthy for the dictionary. Says OED senior assistant editor Fiona Mooring, "They are simply words that we have not included in our dictionary up until this point because we have not yet seen sufficient evidence of their usage."

With words like "tanorexia" and "flashpacking" (sounds dirty, but it's not), I'm guessing this list might overlap with the 10 words Lake Superior State University chooses annually to be banned for "misuse, overuse, and general uselessness."

Want to see the 10 words in the vault that will probably never leave? Keep reading.

Yesterday the New York Times After the Deadline blog posted the 50 most looked-up words so far this year. The words were as informative as omertà (conspiracy of silence, like when gang members refuse to rat each other out) and as surprising, in a sad way, as ubiquitous. Isn't the word ubiquitous?

But where can we take these words? On a bad date. Or maybe to a breakup afterparty? Here are five words from the 50 most looked-up words to get to know if there's someone you want to talk about, fancily.

1. Hubris: Exaggerated pride or self-confidence. Arrogance. His hubris took up a lot of room, enough for her to leave it.Baldenfreude: Coined by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, baldenfruede is schadenfreude (reveling in others' misfortune) directed at bald people. In other words, taking pleasure in another man's baldness. Her new blog, Bald Exes Dine Alone, was pure baldenfruede and unsurprisingly viral.
2. Solipsistic: A theory holding that the self is the only existent thing. Extreme egocentrism. His solipsistic self-view was magnetic — to himself anyway.
3. Desultory: Disappointing progress, performance, or quality. It was a desultory early finish for him, but even more for her.
4. Jejune: It may be an animated little word, but it actually means empty or dull. He was polite and appropriate — so jejune she left.

Anyone want to try a sentence? It's like psych 101 mixed with seventh grade English!

Source: Flickr User Chocolate Geek