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In late November, 2011, the website Dictionary.com announced that its staff had chosen the wordtergiversatethe word that best embodied the experience of being human on the planet Earth in 2011. It is pronounce with the emphasis on the second syllable (which sounds like JIV, not GIVE) and it means "to change repeatedly one's attitude or opinions with respect to a given cause subject, political or philosophical question." It's closely related related in meaning to the word equivocate. One of the Dictionary.com's editors was thinking most likely about politics, the global economy, and international affairs, when he remarked, in support of the selection of tergiversate, that "This year, tumult has been the norm." I'm sorry to admit, however, that I had never heard this word before. The list of runners up offered some more familiar fodder, however: This list included occupy, austerity, Jobs/jobs (cleverly indicating both the common noun and the recently dead genius), insidious, and zugwang. This last entry, which comes from German, and so is pronounced TSOOKVAHNG, with harsh German consonants and a broad vowel in the second syllable, is a term that originated in the game of Chess. It means, literally "compelled to move," but refers to a situation where your opponent (or perhaps life itself) has left you in a position where it's your turn, but every move that is available to you will result in losing a valuable chess piece. In the online list published by Time magazine, occupy was on top. But nothing much else was the same as the list of Dictionary.com nominees. Time's selections included bunga bunga (a tribute to the sexual appetites of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi), tiger mother (a parent, according to a book that was popular early last year, who succeeds in eliciting in her children top level achievements in school, music, the arts, and athletics by means of threats, punishments, and a general regime of discipline that would make George S. Patton quail in his boots), volatility (for a lot of the same reasons as tergiversate), austercation (a new coinage, a conflation of austerity and vacation, to express the idea of getting away for summer, holidays, etc., but not in and extravagant fashion, staying close to home - all related to the dilemmas families faced in the dour economy), and Tebow (used as a verb, in two ways: either it means kneeling in grateful prayer in the end zone following a touchdown or victory; or playing poorly for some 55 minutes and falling behind, but following this by playing brilliantly for the last five minutes of the game, and bringing your team back to win; you sometimes heard it used as a transitive verb, referring to the losing team, as in "the Chargers really got Tebowed this time"), and squeezed middle, whose usage was more or less restricted to Great Britain, and, fittingly, won the Oxford Dictionary's nomination as Word of the Year. The squeezed middle were all the people between the wealthiest and the poorest strata of society, who saw their quality of life more radically altered than others by the straitened economy. In many ways the new year 2012 has dawned quite similar to the old year. Nevertheless, I am certain that if we, together, determine that we shall not tergiversate in our practice of Tebowing, especially when experiencing zugwang, and if we are willing to engage in a little austercation, even those of us who reside in the squeezed middle shall avoid both insidious extremes, that of the tiger mother on the one hand and bunga bunga on the other. May the Lord Jesus grant that it be so. I'll see you in church. Rev. Jim Thomas
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