They've Got A Word For That

Every year the American Dialect Society choose a word that typifies the previous year. For 2007, they chose "subprime". "`Subprime' has been around with bankers for awhile, but now everyone is talking about `subprime,'" said Wayne Glowka, a spokesman for the group.
Okay Wayne, but you had so many words to choose from: "Facebook," "green," "Googleganger" and "waterboarding" didn't make the cut. The one that intrigues me on that list would be "Googleganger", or "a person with your name who shows up when you Google yourself." I would have voted for it, probably because I haven't had to worry about my mortgage for a few years now, but I do spend what might be considered by many an inordinate amount of time Googling myself. And I know that the previous phrase is amusing enough to keep it in my lexicon for a while longer.
As for "subprime," Glowka said it is an odd word as far as linguists are concerned. The prefix "sub" translates roughly to "below the standard," while "prime" means something close to "the best." 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.
Who has been doing this? Are these the same people who are watching "Lost" and buying all those Hannah Montana tickets? It's those meddling kids again. I just know it. They're always messing up a perfectly understandable language with their clever catchphrases and "mettyphors". Last year, these clever kids chose "plutoed," which means "to be demoted or devalued." They say the society began choosing words of the year in 1990 for fun, not in an official capacity to induct words into the English language. Oh sure. That's what they say now. I think they're plutoing their value, not really intending to subprime their efforts. I guess I'll never be one of those cunning linguists.