2010 - a year in words and numbers

My series of entirely useless summing-up posts continues, this time taking up these spent and emptied examples of the genre.

Apparently, the OED added 39 words in 2010, including the vomitous defriend and staycation, the oddly old-fashioned fussbudget and buzzkill, the ubiquitous exit strategy, and the rarely-useful steampunk, quantitative easing, and microblogging. One imagines the difficulty of using all of these in a single sentence, although such a sentence could be a promising entry in the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest.

Of course, my own efforts in bad writing this year were restricted to participating in National Novel Writing Month - in which I completed the 70,000-word satirical Autobiography of Biff Nerfurpleberger. The book contains approximately 4 narrative voices, the two main ones being Biff's own, and his competing autobiographer, someone called Simon Ratmason - both of whom are unreliable narrators. Biff is a bad writer because he's completely inattentive to the fact that he's writing, or, at times, what he's writing. Simon's a terrible writer in the tradition of most celebrity biographers, especially musician biographers. It was great fun to write, even the hideous parts by Simon that made me cringe, or worse. I think, if you're writing a work of fiction, and you're yelling at your narrator, you're doing some worth doing.

Some more words related to 2010 include: peanuts, yeast, turtle, frustrating, delicious, hilarious, and subjection.

And now, some numbers.

0 - the number of remaining payments on Eddie Jetta.
10 - the number of courses at my birthday dinner party.
10 - the number of people at my birthday dinner party.
2 - the number of cats currently living with us.
13.5 - the number of pounds the lighter one weighs.
1 - the number of purple-handled scissors on my desk.
1 - the number of manufacturers who still build tape decks, apparently.

Also: 37, 117, 90, 12, 64, i, 41,233, 0.02.