And so the AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year is (you're going to hate this):
FTW
Yes, you are going to hate it. And you will hate it for one or more of the following reactions:
- "WTF does it mean?"
- "That's internet-speak, which is border-crossing by nature. Why should we think of this as inherently AmE?"
- "That's not a word! It's an alphabetism [or initialism]! At best, it's a phrase!"
- "My nomination was so much better."
Let's take these objections one by one:
First, get your mind out of the gutter. The F stands for for. As in For The Win. If I read it aloud, I read it as that phrase, not as the letters. (I'd be interested to hear if anyone does just pronounce the letters for this meaning.) It's usually used as a post-nominal (after a noun) modifier in order to indicate enthusiastic approval of something--especially something that has 'come through' and 'won' for you. Here are some recent tweets that have used it (and while I typed the last sentence, 59 more twitterers used it):
@HarrysSmile
god, love sophia grace and rosie, essex girls ftw!
@tweet_han
Big bang theory FTW!
@sunny_hundal
What I need is a 'Labour Insider' (unhappy SpAd will do) who has same axe to grind & can repeat himself every week. Journalism job FTW!
@LouiseMensch
This made me laugh. tithenai.tumblr.com/post/321518623… Catholics FTW
[Editor's note: it made me laugh too. Go ahead, (BrE) have/(AmE) take a look!)
The first two of these seem to be by young people watching television. The third writes for The Guardian. The last is a Member of Parliament. So, you might not know FTW...but a lot of people do.
Now, its Americanness: Once upon a time there was a television (AmE) game show/(BrE) quiz show called Hollywood Squares. In it, nine entertainers sit in a giant (AmE) tic-tac-toe/(BrE) noughts-and-crosses array, and two contestants try to get Xs and Os into the boxes. During X's turn, for example, Contestant X chooses which square to attempt. The host, Peter Marshall (who hosted it 1966–1981) then asks the (orig./chiefly AmE) celeb a question, and the celeb says funny things and eventually gives an answer. The contestant then has to decide whether to accept the answer or not.
If contestant X makes the right choice, then "X takes the square", as Marshall would say. When a contestant chose the square that could give them their three Xs or Os in a row, The catchphrase then, as catchphrases do, made its way into non-televised discourse. And in the age of the 140-character limit, it's been initiali{s/z}ed. The full version exists too, even in BrE. A young tweeter in Sussex, whom I won't link to because he's both underage and apparently doing something illegal, has just tweeted "VIDEO PIRACY FOR THE WIN".
I see that the (AmE) show/(BrE) programme was back on the air with Tom Bergeron as host 1998-2004, and while I've watched a couple of wins on YouTube now, I've not heard anyone utter the phrase. If the more recent incarnation hasn't breathed new life into the phrase, then would expect that most young Americans have no idea where FTW comes from. (And even if he did say it and it's being repeated on the Game Show Channel, I'd still not be surprised if young Americans have no idea where it came from.) But knowing the origin of an expression is no prerequisite for using it, so young people, British people, and, according to my Twitter research, an awful lot of German people are using it. I'd expect most Americans of my generation (let's just leave it as 'old enough', ok?) to remember it (maybe not immediately. We're old, you know. I mean, 'old enough'.).
On the "that's not a word" argument. Well, that's been going on very loudly about Oxford Dictionaries' WotY, (BrE) squeezed middle. (Here's a peek at the pro and the con.) If we're considering FTW as an alphabetism, then I point you to just about any introduction to linguistics or morphology text that lists word-formation processes of English. If it's attempting any kind of completeness, it will list 'alphabetism' or 'initialism' as a word-formation process. (Here are some examples.) And if it's a word-formation process, then, well, you know...it must form words.
If you think it's not a word because it's a phrase, I've already ignored you by having a phrase as AmE-to-BrE WotY in 2009 (go missing). For the win (like go missing) is word-like in that it is a bit of language that is learn{ed/t} as a whole, with meaning and usage constraints that go beyond the sum of its parts. That makes it [in my professional usage of the term, at least] a lexeme--something that you'll store in your mental lexicon--the dictionary in your head.* And I'm a lexicologist. We [the three or so people in the world who call themselves lexicologists] mostly deal with words, but, you know, we usually don't see a very important distinction between words and other types of lexemes when thinking about things like lexical borrowing between dialects.
* (Or we could think of it as a lexicali{s/z}ed construction--and I like to think of things that way. But let's not try to squeeze too much of a linguistics degree into this post. It's already way past anybody's bedtime.)
It all comes down to your definition of word. We can fight about it, but I'll just phone in my part of the fight because 'word' is not a terribly useful linguistic concept. Most people think of words as bits of writing with spaces on either side, but that doesn't work. Less masochistic readers might want to skip this bit, but here's is part of the entry on 'Words' that I wrote for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences:
In English orthography, word is easily defined as a unit of language that is written contiguously, with a space on each end. The notion of orthographic word is, however, circular since spaces were introduced into the written code in order to mark the boundaries between words. A more satisfying definition would help explain why such boundaries are perceived in the flow of language. Orthography is also an unreliable indicator of wordhood. Some languages do not have a written form, some orthographies
(e.g., Chinese, Lao) do not mark word boundaries, and any orthographical system is subject to fossilization and arbitrary fashions. For example, on most linguistic criteria, the compound noun ice cream is a single word, in spite of the space within it.
There is no clear linguistic definition of word, however. The most theoretically useful definitions are based on grammatical or phonological criteria [...], but their usefulness is limited by the fact that a) grammatical word and phonological word do not delimit the same set of expressions and that b) no grammatical or phonological criteria for wordhood are applicable to all types of words in all languages.
So: is it a word? Isn't it a word? It's a bit of language whose meaning is more than the sum of its parts and whose form-meaning association has to be learn{ed/t} by, and stored in the memory of, competent speakers of the language. That's good enough for me.
If you object to this word because you didn't nominate it, then you only have Ian Preston to blame for getting there first, arguing his case and attracting support. (BrE Teacherese) Must try harder.
[added: 22 December lunchtime] But why is this the word of 2011? In part it's because 2011 seemed to be the year of win. We had BrE speakers complaining about AmE use of winningest (here, among other places), Charlie Sheen all over the news with Winning! (which has not caught on as much over here--nor has Two and a Half Men), lots of use of win as a mass noun. For evidence of that, I just searched for of win use by tweeters within 50 miles of London and got a lot of results, including:
@codepo8
That@jseidelin man of win has a book out: http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2011/12/my-book-is-now-available.html
@Littlepixel
Actually - this whole site is full of win: lettersofnote.com
samanthahalf Samantha HalfordBut among these, it was FTW that was nominated, and since it has a long history in AmE and a shorter one in BrE, it seemed a clearer instance of dialectal borrowing than the others. Why this year? Because this year is when I noticed my students using it. In fact, it was because of Erin McKean (amazing to discover you know people with their own Wikipedia entries) and one of my English former students using it on social media on the same day that I looked it up--reali{z/s}ing that the F was probably not as bad as it sounded...
My graze box for tomorrow is made of win. And sadly I'll have to nom the whole thing due to the hols. What a shame :D
[Ed: This one might need some translation. Nom was last year's runner-up for the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year. Hols is BrE informal for 'holidays'. If you want to know what a graze box is...]
WotY signing off for another year!
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