Author: Jon Siemko

The NPR host shown in this clip has gotten  Newspea kdown to a science.

From Newsbusters


“I was at – forgive the expression – a Christmas party,” NPR reporter Nina Totenberg interjected on Inside Washington in the weekend’s oddest cautionary separation from a common description for a common event, seemingly embarrassed to invoke any religious terminology for Christmas. She didn’t say what she’d prefer for parties this time of the year to be named. “Winter solstice party”? Just plain old “holiday party”? Or a “seasonal gathering”?


Totenberg’s bashfulness came as she explained how the failure of Congress to pass an annual budget has left federal workers in limbo:

Every year the find people at Webster’s dictionary sort through the most searched words of the year in 2010 the winner was Austerity . With the debt flu sweeping Europe and economic uncertainty  still on the minds of many worried people around the world this word seems more than appropriate.

From  Associated Press

As Greece faced a debt crisis, the government passed a series of strict austerity measures, including taxes hikes and cutting public sector pay.
The move sparked angry protests, strikes and riots across the country as unemployment skyrocketed and the crisis spread to other European nations. The move also incited a rush to online dictionaries from those searching for a definition.

Austerity, the 14th century noun defined as “the quality or state of being austere” and “enforced or extreme economy,” set off enough searches that Merriam-Webster named it as its Word of the Year for 2010, the dictionary’s editors announced Monday.
John Morse, president and publisher of the Springfield, Mass.-based dictionary, said “austerity” saw more than 250,000 searches on the dictionary’s free online tool and came with more coverage of the debt crisis.