Caroline Stone compared hashtags to parentheses.
“If we’re talking about writing … I would say this is honestly like a new type of punctuation,” said the 29-year-old UF doctoral student in media studies. She said when one writes and uses parentheses, it’s used as a side thought.
“The hashtag, for a lot of young people, is used that way,” Stone said.
“Hashtag” was voted as the word of the year during the American Dialect Society annual voting session earlier this month.
“From a societal and cultural standpoint, I think it’s a perfect word of the year,” said UF journalism instructor Steve Johnson. “It represents more than just a single word.”
The first high-profile hashtag appeared on Twitter in 2007, according to the Poynter Institute website, and categorizes for the dual function of filtering and searching.
Daniel Harrison, a 19-year-old UF mechanical engineering freshman, disagreed with the ranking of “hashtag” as word of the year.
“I really don’t think it’s the word of the year — maybe the word of 2010. It’s a little late to the game,” he said. “YOLO should have been the word of the year because it blew up and died down in 2012.”
The word of the year does not have to be brand-new, but it has to be newly prominent in the past year, according to the American Dialect Society’s website.
Word of the year runners-up included YOLO, fiscal cliff, Gangnam style and marriage equality.
