2012 - Whatever, Like, You Know ~ I'm Just Sayin'

New words enter the English language every year, most of which start out as abbreviations or some type of slang. I geek out over such lists and can't get enough - my English Major upbringing, sorry. Here are just a few that were added to the dictionary in 2012 by From Merriam-Webster:

Man Cave
Earworm
Bucket List
Aha Moment
F-Bomb

Obviously some of those have been around for years, which makes me wonder where the dictionary people hang out or what they watch on TV. "Bucket List" is definitely new - a list of things you want to do before you "kick the bucket" - but wasn't "Aha Moment" around during the Gilligan's Island and Bullwinkle days? I recall Tim the Tool Man Taylor on the show Home Improvement designed a "Man Cave" back in the 1990s, which is where I first heard it. The euphemism "F-Bomb" has been around as long as I've been online - about 10 years now. I'm sure I saw it first on Livejournal during some type of Harry Potter fandom war - "Listen, Troll, don't you come around here dropping your F-Bombs on me just because you're hatin' on poor Professor Snape."

But F-Bomb is obviously the description of what Ralphie does when he accidentally says "Oh Fudge" while changing a tire in "A Christmas Story."


Since the "F" word has been around in the English language since the days of Yore, it's pretty cool that we can still come up with polite ways to say it that won't get us banned from Twitter or even Blogger.

"Earworm" - beyond originally being something to do with the corn crop - must harken back to that episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery from the 1970s in which a man gets a parasite called an "earwig" in his ear and realizes it is going to eat his brain; that idea was copied with great effect in the movie Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, when Ricardo Montalban as the evil Khan drops a couple of hideous alien creatures into the ear of poor Commander Chekov. Now when people say "earworm" they mean a song you can't get out of your head, like "Gangnam Style" or the Theme from Friends.

But still, those are useful, descriptive words, and fun times for the English Language.

Not so hot are the slang words we all use which probably won't make it into Webster's or the Oxford English Dictionary.

Over the past year, the phrase "I'm just Sayin'" has become a big joke at my house. During any election year I tend to get a little, shall we say, fired up about politics, but this year I became a total fanatic due to the high stakes for our country. Many times I've watched a family member's eyes glaze over as I told them the news of the day in detail, every gaffe from the Romney camp, every witty saying from whatever pundit, to the point they might raise a hand and say "Enough" or "Okay, Okay," which sometimes didn't phase me.

I became a little famous for adding one more thing, which the caveat addendum "I'm just sayin'" which after months of this, was met with groans from my poor victim conversational partner.

My husband has now became adept at tossing "I'm just sayin'" into almost any conversation as a touche flourish directed at me. He will absolutely love the latest Marist Poll which states that a percentage of Americans hate the phrase "I'm just sayin'" - although they hate other words and phrases even more.

Ya know? Like, you should read this (just sayin'):

Just using our demographic, Ages 45-59, it breaks down this way:

37% . . . Whatever
21% . . . Like
17% . . . You Know
10% . . . Just Sayin'
6% . . . Twitterverse
6% . . . Gotcha
3% . . . Unsure

What's so bad about "Twitterverse"? I sort of like it.
The "Unsure" category cracked me up. I predict that at least 80% of the "Unsure" folks probably use "whatever" or "just sayin'" in their everyday life. Maybe they are just unsure what the fuss is all about or why anyone would waste time polling people on the slang they use? (Just sayin')

Marist Poll Results

For the fourth consecutive year, Americans consider “whatever” to be the most annoying word or phrase in conversation. More than three in ten -- 32% -- have this view while “like” irritates 21% of residents nationally. 17% are most irked by “you know” while 10% would prefer to ban “just sayin’” from today’s lexicon. “Twitterverse” annoys 9% of adults while 5% are ticked off by “gotcha.” Five percent are unsure.

In last year’s survey, 38% thought “whatever” to be the most obnoxious word in casual conversation while 20% said “like” was the most irritating. 19% despised hearing “you know” while “just sayin’” was the most bothersome to 11% of Americans. “Seriously” made last year’s list with 7% reporting it was the most annoying word in conversation. Five percent, at that time, were unsure.

Obama Leading in Polls as Clock Ticks

The NBC/WSJ/Marist Poll that came out on September 13 gives Obama the lead in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia:

From NBC's First Read

In both Florida and Virginia, Obama is ahead of Romney by five points among likely voters (including those leaning toward a particular candidate), 49 percent to 44 percent.

In Ohio, the president’s lead is seven points, 50 percent to 43 percent.

Among a larger pool of registered voters, Obama’s advantage over Romney slightly increases to 7 points in Virginia, 8 in Florida and 9 in Ohio.

. . . Romney likely needs to capture at least two of these states, if not all three, to secure the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency.

By comparison, Obama can reach 270 by winning just one or two of these battlegrounds – on top of the other states already considered to be in his column.

(Obama also has an additional path to victory without any of these three states if he wins the toss-up contests of Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.)

Public Policy Polling reports that Obama has a five point lead in Virginia over Romney:

PPP's newest Virginia poll finds Barack Obama leading by 5 points, 51-46. Obama's lead is unchanged from a month ago when we found him leading 50-45 in the state. He may not be seeing a bump from the convention in the state at this point, but he was in a pretty good position to begin with.

Virginia continues to look like it may be something of a firewall state for Obama. PPP has now polled it 9 times this cycle, and President Obama has led by at least 4 points on all 9 of the polls. He's been ahead by 5 points, 5 points, 8 points, and 8 points over the course of the four surveys we've conducted in 2012.

However, we must be cautious in our reading of such polls, lest we jinx the results with too much idealistic hope. I plead guilty of being optimistic, along with Nancy Pelosi who said this weekend: "If the far right thought that Romney could win, they might be more enthusiastic about him. . . He’s not going to be president."

And then there's the story from Politico that the Romney camp is imploding and throwing senior adviser Stuart Stevens under the bus as the scapegoat. More about that here:
Snark Amendment: Romney Camp Chaos

Conversely there are the Romney-side Republican naysayers who dismiss all polls as inaccurate or untrue because in their state of denial they can't accept a scenario in which Obama might be chosen by the people for a second term. For them, Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo had this message:

I’ve been watching elections professionally for going on two decades.
From a fair amount of experience I’ll say one thing: if your theory is based on some sort of systematic error on the part of most pollsters, you’re almost certainly in for a really long election night.

Indeed!

Nate Silver on on NYT 538 blog writes in "Watching the Clock and Awaiting the Unknown" that we should just watch the polls day by day, and in time all would be revealed.

Each day that Mr. Romney fails to make gains in the polls will count as an opportunity lost for him. And with each passing day, the model will become slightly more confident that a small lead in the polls will translate into an Electoral College victory for Mr. Obama, since the error in the polls becomes smaller as we get closer to Nov. 6.

It’s also worth tracking the number of undecided voters remaining in the race. The model assumes that overall uncertainty in the forecast is a function of the number of undecideds, in addition to the time left until Election Day.

. . . The average bookmaker now makes Mr. Obama about a 75 percent favorite to win re-election, almost exactly as the FiveThirtyEight forecast now does.

Silver does warn about believing all the comparisons to past races, making "if...then" statements about what will happen. For example, Republicans are trying to compare Obama to Dukakis, as reported by David Weigel of Slate at the Values Voter Summit in Washington:

. . . conservatives are talking themselves into optimism. “Before you decide the election is over based on September polls,” writes Mike Huckabee in an email to supporters, “remember that coming out of the 1988 Democratic convention, Gallup showed an insurmountable 17-point lead for that great former president, Michael Dukakis.”

Walking around the conference, I heard the Tale of Dukakis again and again. But the story leaves out how George H.W. Bush’s convention came after Dukakis, and he made the most of the opportunity to erase that lead. Like every “maybe this time will be like that time” analysis, it leaves out the demographic and culture shifts that have made it easier for a Democrat to put together 270 electoral votes.

Nate Silver says to take all such analysis, both pro-Romney or anti-Romney, with a grain of salt. As he explains it:

I would urge some caution if you come across analyses that take the form: “No candidate has won when trailing in the polls by X amount as of Y date, subject to conditions P and Q”.

These analyses may convey something of the right spirit, in that they emphasize that the polls have a history of being pretty accurate after Labor Day and the conventions. But they do it with much more specificity than is warranted. There is no magic date when polls go from being inaccurate to accurate, and no exact threshold at which a lead in the polls goes from being surmountable to insurmountable.

Rather, it all exists along a probabilistic spectrum, with a candidate’s chance of winning primarily a function of the size of his lead, the time remaining until Election Day and the number of undecideds left in the electorate.

So I guess he is trying to give the Republicans some hope that Obama's lead isn't insurmountable, but we do know that most voters have made up their minds, and I don't lean towards the "undecideds" being relevant the way Silver does.