All that Sass

There's no questioning that blogging has changed the way I think. Editorials, and columns in regular printed medium just become blog posts in my mind.

And I enjoyed the Dan Neil column in today's LA Times Magazine. I also enjoyed being able to read it on the couch, unlike what I can get from my desktop computer.

I recently received a news release announcing that the Word of the Year for 2005 was, according to editors of the Webster's New World College Dictionary, "infosnacking"—which denotes the random, through-the-day nibbling of news, e-mail and information on the Web. This surprised me on a couple of counts, the first being that I'd never heard the word, and the second being that the word was so silly and half-assed.

I'm sorry, but if you try to play "infosnacking" in a Scrabble game against me you're going to be picking up tiles for a week. When did the bar for word-ness get to be so appallingly low? And if the witless "infosnacking" is a word, why not say "newsnoshing" or "datamunching," both of which are more euphonious?

"It's a dreadful word, yes," agreed Michael Agnes, editor-in-chief of Webster's NWCD, who talked me off my ledge of indignation by noting that "infosnacking" did not actually make it into the 2005 edition. Word of the Year is an exercise in lexical currency. "The editors pick one word that tickles our funny bone or reminds us of something about the way language works, or reflects our current state of affairs," he says. "It's a word that has a story."