词汇大师--'App' an Apt Word for Tech-Crazy 2010

　　AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We check in with the American Dialect Society for some notable words from the past year, including the one that the group considers least likely to succeed.
RS: But we start with the word of the year for 2010 as voted Friday night at a meeting of language scholars in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ben Zimmer chairs the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society.
BEN ZIMMER: "The word of the year is 'app,' a-p-p. That's, of course, an application program for a computer or a phone operating system. It's a word that has been around for a while. People might have talked about a 'killer¹ app,' a particularly important computer application, like spreadsheets were a killer app.
"But now we use that word app just to refer to these little programs that we run on our mobile devices or on Facebook or lots of other places. People just expect anything should have some sort of associated app now."
RS: "Was app the overwhelming victor?

　　BEN ZIMMER: "Well, the word that came in second place was also a three-letter word, and the one that app beat out is 'nom,' n-o-m, which is a form of onomatopoeia. In other words, it sounds like what it's supposed to represent, in this case the sound of pleasurable eating. You can think of it a bit like 'yum.' It can be used an interjection. It can be used as a noun to refer to delicious food. You could talk about 'noms' as in 'Let's get some noms,' meaning let's get some food to eat."
AA: "When did this arrive on the scene?"
BEN ZIMMER: "Well, it's been percolating² for the past few years, especially online. It also started showing up this past year a lot on Twitter, where on Twitter sometimes if you're sending a tweet while you're eating, you might append a nom on that to talk about how delicious whatever food you're eating happens to be.
"There's a lot of dispute actually about where exactly it first developed. But Cookie Monster from 'Sesame Street' seems to have played an important role in people's use of this, because Cookie Monster on that children's television show eats cookies in a very ravenous³ fashion. And the noise that he makes as he's eating cookies sounds like 'nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom."
AA: "Now, I'm looking at the category of least likely to succeed, and I see that the winner there, with 44 out of 85 votes cast in that category, was -- how do you even pronounce that?"
RS: "Cultur-OH-mics?"
AA: "I can never say it."
BEN ZIMMER: "Well, that's part of the problem --
RS: "Cultur-AH-mics?"
BEN ZIMMER: "People don't know how to pronounce it. The word is 'culturomics,' and it's pronounced cultur-oh-mics, spelled c-u-l-t-u-r-o-m-i-c-s. It's that o-m-i-c-s ending that confused a lot of people. Some people thought this word should be pronounced cultur-ah-mics because it seems like it might have to do with economics.
"But what this word is, it came from a paper that was published in the journal Science by a team of researchers at Harvard and Google. And it was about research that was done analyzing⁴ the history of language and culture by using the millions and millions of books and other materials that have been scanned by Google from the big research libraries.
"What's called Google Books has created a big corpus, or collection of texts, that can now be analyzed⁵ in very interesting new ways. And there are all sorts of great new applications, and Google actually presented this to the public in the form of what they called the N-gram Viewer which allows you to plug in words or phrases and see how they've waxed and waned⁶ over time. So there's all sort of really interesting applications for this research. Unfortunately the name that was given did not quite resonate with people who were trying to figure out what the heck it might mean.
"The name was a bit of a stumper, and the problem with the name is that -omics ending comes from genomics. So that's the study of the human genome and how you can find out things about evolution or population dynamics⁷ by crunching⁹ lots of data and doing what's called genomics. And so the idea here is you could crunch⁸ lots of data about the history of culture and use those similar research techniques for what they call culturomics."
RS: Ben Zimmer is executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and the "On Language" columnist¹⁰ for the New York Times Magazine. He heads the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society.
AA: For links to all of their notable words of 2010 and previous years, and that N-gram Viewer we talked about, go to voanews.com/wordmaster.
RS: And that's WORDMASTER for this week. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 killer   

n.杀人者，杀人犯，杀手，屠杀者

参考例句：

• Heart attacks have become Britain's No.1 killer disease.心脏病已成为英国的头号致命疾病。
• The bulk of the evidence points to him as her killer.大量证据证明是他杀死她的。

2 percolating   

n.渗透v.滤( percolate的现在分词 )；渗透；（思想等）渗透；渗入

参考例句：

• Bubbles simply supply a short cut for the faster-moving percolating gas. 气泡不过是对快速运动的渗透气体提供了一条捷径。 来自辞典例句
• I' ll percolate some coffee, ie make it by percolating. 我去用过滤法煮些咖啡。 来自辞典例句

3 ravenous   

adj.极饿的，贪婪的

参考例句：

• The ravenous children ate everything on the table.饿极了的孩子把桌上所有东西吃掉了。
• Most infants have a ravenous appetite.大多数婴儿胃口极好。

4 analyzing   

v.分析；分析( analyze的现在分词 )；分解；解释；对…进行心理分析n.分析

参考例句：

• Analyzing the date of some socialist countries presents even greater problem s. 分析某些社会主义国家的统计数据，暴露出的问题甚至更大。 来自辞典例句
• He undoubtedly was not far off the mark in analyzing its predictions. 当然，他对其预测所作的分析倒也八九不离十。 来自辞典例句

5 analyzed   

v.分析( analyze的过去式和过去分词 )；分解；解释；对…进行心理分析

参考例句：

• The doctors analyzed the blood sample for anemia. 医生们分析了贫血的血样。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The young man did not analyze the process of his captivation and enrapturement, for love to him was a mystery and could not be analyzed. 这年轻人没有分析自己蛊惑著迷的过程，因为对他来说，爱是个不可分析的迷。 来自《简明英汉词典》

6 waned   

v.衰落( wane的过去式和过去分词 )；（月）亏；变小；变暗淡

参考例句：

• However,my enthusiasm waned.The time I spent at exercises gradually diminished. 然而，我的热情减退了。我在做操上花的时间逐渐减少了。 来自《用法词典》
• The bicycle craze has waned. 自行车热已冷下去了。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

7 dynamics   

n.力学，动力学，动力，原动力；动态

参考例句：

• In order to succeed,you must master complicated knowledge of dynamics.要取得胜利，你必须掌握很复杂的动力学知识。
• Dynamics is a discipline that cannot be mastered without extensive practice.动力学是一门不做大量习题就不能掌握的学科。

8 crunch   

n.关键时刻；艰难局面；v.发出碎裂声

参考例句：

• If it comes to the crunch they'll support us.关键时刻他们是会支持我们的。
• People who crunch nuts at the movies can be very annoying.看电影时嘎吱作声地嚼干果的人会使人十分讨厌。

9 crunching   

v.嘎吱嘎吱地咬嚼( crunch的现在分词 )；嘎吱作响；（快速大量地）处理信息；数字捣弄

参考例句：

• The horses were crunching their straw at their manger. 这些马在嘎吱嘎吱地吃槽里的草。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The dog was crunching a bone. 狗正嘎吱嘎吱地嚼骨头。 来自《简明英汉词典》

10 columnist   

n.专栏作家

参考例句：

• The host was interviewing a local columnist.节目主持人正在同一位当地的专栏作家交谈。
• She's a columnist for USA Today.她是《今日美国报》的专栏作家。