LOS ANGELES - "Palinism" and "Obama-mess" are likely to be among the top global words of 2011, as the United States gears up for its next presidential elections, according to a language monitoring group.
The coming year will also likely be commonly deemed "Twenty-Eleven" as the English-speaking world moves away from disagreement over how to pronounce the first years of the decade, the Global Language Monitor said on Monday.
But the "great recession" is expected to hang around in 2011 as a well-used term while the world economy struggles to right itself.
"Palinism" has been around for a couple of years, used mostly to coin malapropisms from Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin, including her 2010 conflation "refudiate".
According to the UrbanDictionary.com, "Palinism" is also sometimes defined as "other illogical stream of conscious meanderings uttered by Sarah Palin."
Palin, who ran unsuccessfully for vice-president in 2008 as a Republican and is now a conservative political activist, best-selling author and TV star, is pondering whether to run for U.S. president in 2012.
Global Language Monitor president Paul JJ Payack said Americans were thus likely to see and hear more of Palin in 2011, adding that "the media needs an heir to 'Bushisms' and Sarah Palin is the candidate of choice here."
Payack said that "Obama-mess" is expected to be big in 2011. "If (President Barack) Obama regains his magic, he escaped his Obama-mess; if his rating sinks further, he continues to be engulfed by it."
The Texas-based Global Language Monitor has gathered the Top 10 words at the end of each year since 2000, according to citations in the media and on the Internet from throughout the English-speaking world.
"To project possible top words for 2011, we analyzed the categories that we monitor and then chose words from each representative of various world trends," Payack said.
The monitoring group's projected Top Words of 2011 are:
1) Twenty-Eleven -- to pronounce the word 2011.
2) Obama-mess
3) Great Recession
4) Palinism
5) TwitFlocker -- a placeholder for the next big trend following Facebook and Twitter.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
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