In its 23rd annual Words of the Year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “hashtag” as the word of the year for 2012. So in honour of our newly crowned word of the year, let’s take a quick look at some recent commentary on the use of hashtags.

In his post On “Hashtag” and Remembering the Internet is Awkward, Drew Breunig comments as follows on the word of the year vote:

Computers don’t understand us. They’re getting better, but this last mile is turning out to be a doozy. Siri garbles every third word and struggles with accents, Google trips on words, and Facebook and iPhoto facial recognition systems see faces where there aren’t any. People are messy and the real world isn’t clean. It’s hard for computers to understand us.

The hashtag is us giving them a hand, providing a clue to our intentions they can easily parse. Hashtags are us talking loud and slow in a foreign land. They’re awkward, which is precisely why they’re important to note.

This is true, but it’s only half the story. The hashtag has become so much more than a way to organise information — it can be a device for humour, activism, spam, and everything in between. The New York Times explains it well in an article full of great examples, called In Praise of the Hashtag:

But the hashtag, for the dexterous user, is a versatile tool — one that can be deployed in a host of linguistically complex ways. In addition to serving as metadata (#whatthetweetisabout), the hashtag gives the writer the opportunity to comment on his own emotional state, to sarcastically undercut his own tweet, to construct an extra layer of irony, to offer a flash of evocative imagery or to deliver metaphors with striking economy. It’s a device that allows the best writers to operate in multiple registers at once, in a compressed space. It’s the Tuvan throat singing of the Internet.

Not all hashtag usage is good, though. Apart from the fact that most hashtag jokes aren’t very funny — it takes some real talent to use it well — it can also be harmful in several ways. For example, in Fear the hashtags of rage, Watts Martin critiques the use of hashtags as activism, saying it has become a way to feel like we’re doing something positive to support a cause — and effectively to absolve ourselves from doing any real work to affect the change we seek:

There’s also an ugly [side to the hashtag of rage]: “it’s somebody else’s responsibility to take the hits for what we want.” We want to write our protest signs and have somebody else march with them. By God, our service providers should stand up for what we believe in, secure in the knowledge that if they lose business, get shut down or even face jail time, we’ll write the angriest blog posts ever about that. Maybe not under our real name, you understand. Can’t be too careful.

And then there’s also the absurd side of things. Luckily I haven’t experienced this myself, but in Twitterish John McWhorter tells us that the hashtag is even becoming a thing in the spoken word:

The new thing, however, is using the word “hashtag” in conversation. Especially if you are under a certain age, you may be catching people saying things like, “I ran into that guy I met—hashtag happy!” or, in response to someone complaining, “My flashlight app isn’t working,” perhaps you have heard the retort, “Hashtag First World problems!” A college student not long ago reported a favourite witticism to be appending observations with: “Hashtag did that just happen?”

Hashtag yikes¹.

It’s interesting to see something that was created for taxonomy purposes transformed into such a ubiquitous and diverse linguistic tool. For that reason, I think “hashtag” is a worthy choice for word of the year.