Here at Choice we like to think of ourselves as both part of the new knowledge early warning system and guardians of the language, two goals that are not always in harmony.  Spending one’s time reviewing new scholarly works means encountering a steady stream of new words, new concepts, and even whole new disciplines.  It is safe to say, for example, that in 1964 no Choice editor encountered a book on “virtual reality,” a term found in the title of at least fifteen works reviewed by Choice since the early 1990s.

It is easy, in this era of constant technological change, to overlook the fact that language, like technology, is in a constant state of flux.  All those folks carrying the latest and greatest smart phone or e-book reader are hard to miss, whereas all those new words tend to sneak up on you.  But in the end, the continual evolution of our language often has the greater impact on our daily lives.

Words, after all, are the tools that we use to describe and explain our lives and to share our knowledge.  Without words, there would be no technology, no communication, and no knowledge.  And if language is our gateway to knowledge, it stands to reason that language, like knowledge, constantly evolves.  New technologies and new knowledge not only generate new language, they require it.  New words enter our lives with each new concept, new technology, and new philosophy.

This is not to suggest that all changes in language result from advances in knowledge.  Far from it.  It is unlikely, for example, that “zombie bank,” “freemium,” or “tweetaholic,” to name but several candidates for the 2009 Oxford Word of the Year (the winner was “unfriend”), have scholarly origins or significance.  Moreover, most of us could surely list any number of new words that we could do without.  (This aging editor and publisher, for example, would rejoice if any of the following were to vanish from the language: “hopefully,” “whatever,” “task” used as a verb as in “X was tasked with,” and the equivalent usage of the noun “impact.”)

But if one of our tasks at Choice is to sort out the wheat from the chaff, we recognize that this in no way absolves us from endeavoring to keep pace with the changes in language that accompany new knowledge.  And that means doing our best to distinguish between important new concepts like virtual reality and bioinformatics and neologisms like “deleb” (as in a dead celebrity).  Does the world really need a field of “deleb studies”?  We think not, but we know that only time will tell whether the new words and concepts we encounter on a daily basis will be long forgotten or still in use ages and ages hence.

And so it is with humility that we continue to pursue our basic goal, which is to recognize the good stuff and bring it to your attention while encumbering you with as little dreck as possible.  Not an easy task when the times they are always a changin’, but then that is another, older kind of reality.–IER