Business and finance
ARNOLD ZWICKY and Jan Freeman have pointed to Ted McCagg's blog, which has been hosting a "Best Word Ever contest". That there seemed to be no rules, no criteria and apparently no "contest" except for Mr McCagg's own choice is no matter. Brackets of competing words like like whirligig and scalawag and zydeco and angina have faced off in a gradually narrowing contest over the course of months. The entrants seemed to be chosen for the sheer fun of saying them (angina and xenophobia being unpleasant, otherwise).
Today, the winner was announced. Pleasingly, it was a linguistic term. But competition is nothing without controversy. Did the winner deserve its title? The word is fun to say, but its meaning is fairly pedestrian. I'd have liked chiasmus or catachresis to get a shot. In fact, there could have been a whole bracket of Greek-derived language-related words that are fun to say: deixis, allophone, synecdoche...
Of all the words out there, what would you have voted for?