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There is a major decision coming up that will truly define the year 2012. Yes, it's almost time for the American Dialect Society to once again vote on the Word of the Year. Will it be selfie? Hate-watching? Superstorm? Double down? Fiscal cliff? Or (shudder) YOLO?

Ben Zimmer is a language columnist for the Boston Globe, and the chair of the ADS's New Words Committee. He tells NPR's Renee Montagne that the Word of the Year can be either a word or a phrase, as long as it's achieved new prominence in 2012. "You might have heard about YOLO, the acronym for 'you only live once.' YOLO caught on this year as a bit of youth slang that young people are already a little sick of."

A selfie is a self-portrait photograph, usually posted to a social networking site — and used most memorably by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (or, let's be honest, one of her aides) in a humorous message to the Texts from Hillary Tumblr account. "Another word that I was introduced to this year which I quite like, hate-watching, which describes the masochistic act of continuing to watch a TV show even if you hate it."

And of course there were the old-fashioned words that resurfaced this year, like malarkey, popularized by Vice President Joe Biden in a debate with Paul Ryan. "That's a great Irish-American word that's been around for about a century ... it's such a great evocative word and it grabbed people's interest," Zimmer says. "It turns out it was Irish-American newspaper writers who popularized it in the early 20th century."

Some words captured public attention for sadder reasons, like superstorm, coined to describe Hurricane Sandy. "Someone from the National Weather Service actually suggested Frankenstorm, because it was a hybrid of different weather systems, like Frankenstein's monster, and it was also going to hit around Halloween," Zimmer says. But many news organizations considered Frankenstorm too light-hearted in the wake of the disaster, so the consensus settled on superstorm.

Commentary

Forget YOLO: Why 'Big Data' Should Be The Word Of The Year

This is the movie's most problematic aspect. The cinematic brief filed by Berg, who previously investigated a sexually abusive priest in the powerful Deliver Us from Evil, seems strong. But Paradise Lost 2: Revelations also compellingly singled out a possible perpetrator of the murders. That person is no longer considered a likely suspect.

The three's high-profile defenders have long been part of the story. The members of Metallica gave their aid (and music) to the Paradise Lost movies. Subsequently, Johnny Depp, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins and others have added their voices. Australian rockers Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (of Dirty Three) joined the movement by composing the West of Memphis score.

There's another significant Down Under connection: This documentary was co-produced by Lord of the Rings maestro Peter Jackson and his wife and collaborator, Fran Walsh. (Echols and Lorri Davis, the woman who married him behind bars in 1999, are also co-producers.)

If West of Memphis spends a great deal of time with the trio's advocates, that seems warranted. Without outside pressure, Baldwin and Misskelly would still be in prison, and Echols might well have been executed. Mara Leveritt, who wrote a book on the three, notes that they benefited from a "crowd-sourced investigation." It took way too long, but the crowd finally bested the mob. (Recommended)

Amanda Cohen's Dirt Candy is a graphic novel, vegetarian cookbook and memoir. But because it's all of those things, it's also not exactly any of them — so it fell between the cracks.

Cohen's restaurant in New York City's East Village is called Dirt Candy because it's focused entirely on vegetables (which Cohen says are candy from the dirt). Even though the place has become a foodie destination, it's teeny, with just nine tables. The narrow dining area doubles as the prep kitchen before people come for dinner.

There's barely room to breathe as Cohen's helpers slice through heaps of long beans to be served with Moroccan herbs and coconut-poached tofu, and whisk gallons of scallion pancake batter. (That's what I swooned over during a dinner that started with crispy hot jalapeno hush puppies and a meltingly rich cube of portobello mushroom mousse, modulated with a bright truffle pear and fennel compote.)

On the 18th century gin craze

"This is a period between about ... 1720 and 1750. There's a huge amount of public disquiet, not only about the low price of gin, but the social effects that this is having. Probably the most famous representation of this is the great English artist William Hogarth produces an engraving called Gin Lane, which is a terrible image of the social breakdown that's being caused by gin ... In fact, if you wanted a very good modern parallel for the way that gin was regarded in the 18th century, crack is probably a very, very good one. And Gin Lane really does capture this in appallingly gruesome detail. All sorts of images of death and social breakdown and madness being caused by this spirit."

On what finally brought gin to respectability

"Firstly, we should say ... a very important American invention, possibly one of the great American cultural contributions to the world, is the invention of the cocktail. Through the 19th century, first of all Americans, then Europeans, get the habit of drinking spirits mixed up with the whole happy hour of other things: bitters and tonics and all sorts of things. And that helps to make gin more respectable. It's just one more ingredient in the cocktail cabinet.

"I think the second thing that helps to make gin more respectable is the growth of the gin and tonic. If you imagine colonists from Europe going out to the tropics in the 19th century, one of the biggest problems they face is malaria — terrible, terrible disease, kills many thousands of Europeans, and of course many hundreds of thousands of Africans in this period. Now, at the time, there's only one effective treatment, and that's a drug which in Britain is called quinine ... It's derived from the bark of a tree that grows in South America. Now the trouble with quinine is it's incredibly bitter; it's like chewing coffee beans. So in the 19th century lots of companies start producing more palatable ways of taking your daily quinine — this is tonic water.

"Now, British colonists in the late 19th century discover that tonic water and gin sort of complement one other. They've both got this rather sort of refreshing botanical kind of flavor. So the British start drinking the gin and tonic and making it the distinctive drink of British colonials. And they bring this habit back to Britain in the, I suppose, in the 20th century. So those are the two things that start to make gin a much more respectable prospect."

On the gin-based cocktails pink gin and Kublai Khan No. 2

"Well, pink gin again speaks to this rather wonderful global history that gin has. Pink gin is a combination of gin and bitters. Now, bitters were invented essentially in the 18th century as a kind of remedy for seasickness. So again, you've got this idea of sort of global trade and exchange; people going all around the world taking gin with them and then using it to sort of mix up their own home remedies. And pink gin became the classic drink of the British Royal Navy.

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