The Word of the Year

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Credit Nina J. G.via Flickr Creative Commons

In December and January, programs like ours will be littered with nostalgic end-of-year material designed to help put 2012 behind us. 

But before the top-ten lists and topical reviews comes a simple and curious retrospective: “The Word of the Year,” an honor decided by the esteemed folks behind the Oxford U.S. dictionary.  Katherine Martin is head of the U.S. Dictionaries Program at Oxford University Press. She joins us now to share, explain, and perhaps defend, Oxford’s 2012 Word of the Year.