'Occupy', 'Arab Spring' Top List of 2011 Words, Phrases

If the words we use are any indication, it's been a busy year for protests, revolutions, and the Royals.

An annual list of the top words and phrases found in the media and on social networking sites finds that "Occupy", as in Occupy Wall Street, was the top word of 2011, while "Arab Spring" was the top phrase. The Global Language Monitor, a Texas-based company, uses an algorithm to scan 75,000 different media organizations from around the world to determine what words best describe the lexicological milieu. Given the tumult over the last year, it's not too surprising to see "Arab Spring", "great recession", "climate change", and "anger and rage" cracking the top five phrases of the year. (Neither is it to see "Royal Wedding" up there, which, depending on your perspective, could be even more depressing than the other four.) As far as words go, "deficit" followed Occupy, as did "fracking", "drone" (as in the unmanned aircraft used in military strikes), and "non-veg", a term for meals with meat. Rounding out the list was "Kummerspeck", a German word directly translated to "grief bacon" used to refer to weight put on by emotional eating, "haboob", an Arabic word for sandstorm, "3Q", a term for "thank you" that "Trustafarians", a popular term to describe wealthy kids that took part in the London riots, and "99", referring to the "99 per cent" bandied about by the Occupy protests. Steve Jobs, the recently deceased CEO of Apple, was the most commonly citied name, beating out Osama bin Laden by some 30 per cent. Other names included Kate Middleton, Hu Jintao, Moammar Gadhafi, and Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, the Russian hockey team wiped out in an airplane crash. No word on where "Kardashian" was on the list.