(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-01-05 21:31

As for "subprime," Glowka said it is an odd word - at least as far as linguists are concerned.

The prefix "sub" translates roughly to "below the standard," while "prime" means something close to "the best."

So, according to Glowka, the word really means "far below the best."

"People were saying that students were referring to their tests, `I'm going to subprime this; I'm going to mess it up,'" he said.

The American Dialect Society, founded in 1889, comprises linguists, grammarians, historians and scholars, among others. The society began choosing words of the year in 1990 for fun, not in an official capacity to induct words into the English language.

In 2006, the organization chose "plutoed," which means "to be demoted or devalued."

   1 2   

   1 2