SFGate: Culture Blog! : Vlae Kershner
UPDATE: At our editorial meeting, we considered the nominations in the comments below and there was a discussion over "celebutard," which has been mentioned several times. Most people thought it was funny, and reflected the year well, but there was concern that it is offensive because of the tie to the schoolyard insult "retard." Your comments welcome.
Once again, we're looking for your help in selecting SFGate's Word of the Year. No, we're not pretexting.
This is the sixth time we've asked readers for their choice of a word that best encapsulates the prior 12 months.
Previous winners were "nine-eleven" in 2001, "nukular" in 2002, "metrosexual" in 2003, "red state/blue state" in 2004 and in 2005.
This year, two dictionary publishers already have weighed in with their selections. Webster's New World picked the gadget nickname while Merriam-Webster went with Stephen Colbert's satirical
Send us your nominations via the comment link at the bottom of this post (If you're not registered, it won't take long to do so).
Please include an explanation of why your word or words should be selected.
Our web jockeys will select the finalists, giving special consideration to the words that get the most nominations. We'll hold a vote in a poll next week.
Two stories, coming over the wire within the last few hours:
One, on the satisfaction of people in various countries with their sex lives, says that the , with only about a quarter of people between 40 and 80 surveyed gettin' good lovin'. The researcher theorizes that's because Japan is a male-dominated society where the men don't really care about their partner's satisfaction.
The other, on U.
S. death rates declining, says the Japanese on average , the longest of any country along with tiny Monaco and San Marino.
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
You'd think sex and life would be positively correlated, right Mark? Anyone have a theory? Too much sushi and not enough oysters?
So what counts as alternative rock anyway? The jocks at have gone public with their dispute over where to draw the line. The station's new "Morning Music Co-op" -- who came out from Chicago to replace Howard Stern when the hairy boor rang the cash register on satellite radio -- is going heavy on requests.
So last Friday, when a male San Jose listener asked for "Enter Sandman" by Metallica, they obliged. Hell yes, we're alternative! (Courtesy of Metallica)
A few hours later, evening jock Madden told listeners he was so angry to hear Metallica he didn't even feel like showing up for work.
He's a believer in Live 105's new mission statement -- "Fighting to keep alternative music alive in the Bay Area" -- and whatever Metallica may be, it ain't alternative. The morning crew of Woody Fife, Renae Ravey and Tony Mott kept their cool, a wise idea for newcomers who aren't quite sure of their ground amid the seismic tremors of cultural San Francisco. Instead of fighting back, they invited Madden to appear on their show this morning.
That produced a 20-minute discussion that sounded like a dispute in a weekly staff meeting where everyone was being polite because the boss's boss was in the room. I was on the freeway and couldn't take notes, but here's a paraphrase of some of the arguments: Madden: This station lost a lot of its female audience when it started playing Korn and Limp Bizkit a few years ago. Now that we've gone back to alternative, don't blow it by playing metal.
Madden: Where do you guys draw the line? What if someone asked for AC-DC? Or John Mayer?
Morning crew: We don't want to set a line. (Not stated but implied: We know what gets us good ratings.) Even though (or maybe because) everyone was acting civilized, it made for compelling, honest radio, such as when a caller offered the opinion that any station that plays the Killers all the time can't make much of a case for being pure alternative.
Anyhow, the jocks did all agree on one thing. They won't play Lynyrd Skynyrd. With the most anticipated college football game in decades coming up Wednesday night between USC and Texas, it's a fine time to visit an odd duck of a blog dedicated to one of the contenders.
Most sports blogs revolve around a few themes. "Our team is red hot; your team ain't doodly-squat." "Let's get a decent relief pitcher.
" "Anybody got tickets?" The Boi from Troy posted this photo of him with Trojan linebacker Dallas Startz.
be zillions of those -- combines a fan site dedicated to the USC Trojans with a gay site and throws in some conservative political commentary.
A few weeks ago, he mixed it up with some Texas Longhorns fans from , who sniffed that they only wanted to debate more traditional sports blog foes. One thing the Boi is careful not to do is openly ogle his team's players. And the Men of Troy seem to have accepted him as part of the fanscape, as shown in the of the Boi with linebacker Dallas Sartz.
But tolerance for the Boi clearly doesn't extend to his college rivals. Before the Trojans played UCLA, he tried to organize a party for gay and lesbian student and alumni groups from both schools -- and showed up. The Greek term for "excessive pride or self-confidence" was chosen by 41 percent of the nearly 2,300 SFGate readers who participated in our online poll.
"Disaster," which got the most from readers, finished second. "Hubris" joins four far more modern words -- "nine-eleven," "nukular," "metrosexual" and "red state/blue state" -- as a winner of the five-year-old SFGate.com contest.
Hubris was a central theme of Sophocles' play about the fall of King Oedipus, which was honored at Athens' annual drama festival about 427 B.C. This year, numerous commentators cited hubris as the cause of what they considered human overreaching, from the below-sea-level development of New Orleans to the U.
S. war in Iraq. Reached by river ferry at his home in Hades, the shade of Oedipus allegedly commented: "Can't the media just forget about my after all these centuries?
'Tis enough to give one a complex." During the last year, The Chronicle and SFGate.com have carried approximately 40,000 staff-written stories.
We went back to see which ones got the most page views. Obviously, the factors that make a story popular aren't necessarily those that make it of lasting significance. But as this list shows, it's not only the most sensational stories that people want to read.
10. (10/20). Couldn't we just start with No.
9? 9. (8/3).
Authorities' handling of this case spurred outrage, and a day later, the 11-year-old girl who had faced felony assault charges was put on probation. 7. (7/6).
This is the surprise story on the list, read by the HIV-interested community worldwide. 6. (9/26).
Misinformation about Pat Tillman's death in April 2004 remains a controversial subject. 5. (12/14).
Kevin Fagan's description puts you in the room for an event that was anything but routine. 4. (1/19).
A film shot under deceptive pretenses helped touch off a yearlong debate over whether a suicide barrier is needed. 3. Mark Morford's regulars long have known what he thinks of a certain software giant, and after this column flew around the Web, so did a lot of other people.
2. (8/22). Day 1 got the most clicks, but also take a look at , when Penn wound up in the middle of an ugly bust-up of a women's rights demonstration.
1. (6/2). We Gatesters long will remember the morning of this Matier Ross column, in large measure because the overwhelming popularity of the accompanying video set off a scramble to obtain bandwidth.
Time to pick our fifth annual Word of the Year! Responding to last week, several hundred readers submitted nominations either through or by e-mail. At least 175 words or phrases were nominated.
Among the words nominated: bird flu, blame game, Bushwhacked, evacuee, facebook, FEMA, Katrina (or Katrita), lagniappe, pandemic, Podcast, quagmire, terrestrial radio. Yeah, most people didn't think it was a great year. We selected the finalists based on the number of nominations, the arguments made for them and diversity of topics.
Here they are, accompanied by a reader's comment: Disaster: "From hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and Central America to earthquakes in Pakistan/Asia to the insurgency and tragedy in Iraq to the Iranian election of a racist fascist, this year was one man-made or man-amplified disaster after another." -- Noah. Hubris: "For obvious reasons not only related to Iraq.
" -- asiago. Insurgency: "Where did this word come from? Who were the 'insurgents' in WW II, Korea, Vietnam, Panama, the Falkland Islands?
Is this the 21st Century word for 'resistance'?" -- Rob C. Jump the Couch: This update of the TV saying "jump the shark" is "a defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end, such as Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch" to show his love for Katie Holmes.
-- Swanlake. Levee: "Who outside of flood-prone areas really understood what a levee was, aside from a word that rhymes with 'Chevy' in the song 'American Pie,' before Katrina came along?" -- ottavarima.
Mashup: "Not only does this word capture a hot trend in both music and software (Web 2.0) development, but seen in another light, it sounds like big things colliding. Lots of that going on this year!
" -- tritisan. Vote in our poll, which is on the . We'll announce the winner next week.
This is the fifth time we've asked our readers to select the word that best encapsulates the prior 12 months. was "red state/blue state," joining "nine-eleven" in 2001, "nukular" in 2002 and "metrosexual" in 2003. This year's winner might have something to do with a nine-letter word for a very windy destructive storm.
But there are other candidates too, from the choice of "Podcast" to "persistent vegetative state." One new wrinkle: We're taking nominations through our blog format, so that everyone can see and comment on the entries. Just submit your nominations through the comment link at the bottom of this post.
(If you're not registered, it should only take a minute.) Include a brief explanation of why your word or words should be selected. Keep it clean, please, we're a family website.
Alternatively, you can and I'll post some of the more interesting suggestions. A ? Finally.
They owe us. For machinelike stooge in "From Russia With Love." For cold industrialist Christopher Walken in "A View to a Kill," whose back story places him as the of a Nazi breeding experiment gone awry.
And most of all for the times that suave dark-haired Sean Connery walked off with Britt Ekland or Jill Masterson. You know the blond stereotypes: The icy eurovillain, the pretty boy, the dumb jock fraternity president in "Revenge Of The Nerds," the oh-so-snobbish Princetonian ( in "The Talented Mr. Ripley.
")
The new James Bond, Daniel Craig, strikes a blow for blond males.
What positive role models do we have? Sure there's Redford -- beautiful boy, handsome leading man, but he sure hasn't aged as gracefully as Connery.
Brad Pitt? Don't get me started.
Now I realize that the penchant for blond male villains that grew up as a reaction to the Nazis may not be as vicious as some of the other ethnic stereotypes Hollywood has perpetrated over the decades.
But this one is doubly hard to get rid of because, in a reverse prejudice kind of way, it's politically correct.
It's high time for producers to get over that "Aryan-superman-means-bad" complex. Look at this photo of -- not exactly slim, blond, blue-eyed types.
Stiller and Diaz. So it's about time someone of the sandy-haired persuasion is getting a chance to live out the fantasy of the world's most recognizable action hero. I mean, it's not as though in real life we have no chance of getting the girl.
All those natural blonde bombshells -- who the hell do you think could be their fathers?
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