2014: The Year of Culture?

by Paula Newton December 17, 2014

petri-dish-artIt’s official—Merriam-Webster has declared the 2014 Word of the Year to be “culture.”

People in the arts, of course, already knows what it means:

a: enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training.
b: acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills.

Actually, that’s the fourth of six definitions of culture in the Merriam-Webster dictionary but, for some reason, lots of folks were looking up that word this year (the dictionary uses some formula of the number of online searches and the spike in searches from previous years). So what were people searching for? Pop culture, museum culture, Eastern culture, consumer culture, Culture Club? Did society feel more cultured in 2014? How cultured is a society that has to look up the definition of culture?

For wordnerds, here is the rest of the Top Ten list, at least one of which seems to have been inspired by a Sonic commercial (how’s that for culture?).

2: Nostalgia

3: Insidious

4: Legacy

5: Feminism

6: Je ne sais quoi

7: Innovation

8: Surreptitious

9: Autonomy

10: Morbidity

2 comments

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2 comments

Joe Spurlock December 17, 2014 - 10:24

Unfortunately, this has been the year that artists (in Tx at least) are fighting for better treatment more than making art. The “leaders” in arts admin are more interested in gala’s and cocktail parties (where little to no artists are invited mind you), than letting the creative community create. Artists are fighting for grant money to be awarded, commissions to be honored and for representation on committees and panels.

Let the people work, and you will get a much better product. Cultural plan be damned

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Albert Omaha December 18, 2014 - 19:00

Thought I read that the word “vape” was word of the year…maybe that’s new word of the year. Both seem lacking.

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