Further, they even went so far as to pick the suffix "-ism" in 2015 as the word of the year, so clearly, WOTY contenders are not subject to a lot of hard and fast rules by those running the show ...

These rules don’t apply outside the U.S. In Britain, for example, forms like “fella”. are correct, as logic dictates. But here, for the time being, that’s always a mistake.

Word of the year contests teach us something about our collective psyche.