It’s half of 808 with all the heartbreak — ‘404,’ the internet error code that has become a more widely distributed product of Healthcare.gov than insurance, is your ‘word of the year.’
The Global Language Monitor, an Austin, Texas company that researches and analyzes developments particularly in the English language, conferred the title on the technical term in an announcement Wednesday. 404 “is the near-universal numeric code for failure on the global Internet,” GLM noted in a press release, making the failed Obamacare website launch a fitting hook.
“404 has gained enormous attention the world over this year as systems in place since World War II, which many see as the beginning of the contemporary era, are in distress or even failure,” Paul JJ Payack, the organization’s president and ‘Chief Word Analyst,’ said. “The recent Obamacare launch debacle in the U.S. is only a representative example of a much wider system fail.”
Part of that ‘fail,’ Payack noted, is “deadlock in the U.S. government” and “the global web of intrigue and surveillance by the [National Security Agency].”
Appropriately, the second- and third-place words are ‘fail’ and ‘hashtag,’ respectively; the Healthcare.gov dud indeed has been a #fail.
Several other words in the top 15 have an American politics connotation, including the political term ‘optic’ (5), surveillance (6), drones (7), deficit (8), sequestration (9), and filibuster (11). ‘Franken,’ which checks in at 15 on the list, is not a direct reference to the Democratic Minnesota senator, but is the “top trending prefix on the list[,] expanded in meaning to include any human-instigated activity that inadvertently spins out of control.”
This is the 14th year that GLM has surveyed the English language ’round the globe for these awards.
(h / t Washington Times)
