Esther Lee/Flickr
Words, like cultural trends, are fluid.
New ones emerge, existing ones change in meaning, and some inevitably fall out of usage.
To celebrate the power of words within American culture, the American Dialect Society has released its "Word of the Year" every year since 1990. This year's word is "they," in the context of a singular genderless pronoun, to highlight the strides the US has made in respecting people who don't identify as a man or woman.
Over the last 10 years, the ADS has somehow managed to encapsulate a key theme of each year just as concisely.
Here's how the decade played out, one word at a time.
Colbert Report screencap
Stephen Colbert's favorite word reflected a year in which whole truths weren't always "nothing but the truth." Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in the summer of 2005, sending President George W. Bush scrambling to deliver federal aid, which unfortunately arrived too late.
The president's inability to declare Katrina an emergency, and his later denying that hesitance, cast severe doubt over his presidency.
Truthiness also made an appearance as author James Frey's memoir "A Million Little Pieces" was revealed to be highly fictionalized, despite being selected as a pick for Oprah's Book Club.
NASA
Eliminating an entire planet from the solar system is newsworthy, so much so that it gained traction in 2006 as its own verb.
"To pluto" something means to demote it from a previously illustrious standing, in the same way the actual planet was downgraded to the status of "dwarf planet" because of its tiny size.
Thomson Reuters
As "The Big Short" recently (and speedily) explained, the US housing market began its terrifying plunge in 2007. Either out of malice or negligence, banks began issuing loans regardless of whether the applicants were able to pay them back. These subprime mortgages caused a rush to the market — a "bubble" — that led to billions of dollars lost and the Great Recession a year later.
From lost jobs to greedy bankers, the word "subprime" captures everything about 2007 that mattered most to people.
