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A peloton of people
were lost in 2004

OK, kids, here's your assignment: List the top 10 words looked up in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary in 2004. Now, use them in one sentence. You have 30 seconds.

Good job. If you wrote the following sentence: "A peloton of bloggers favoring an insurgent threw the electoral incumbent into a cicada hurricane in an act of partisan defenestration aimed at sovereignty," give yourself an A-minus and check yourself into the nearest clinic for grammatical hernia treatment.

You got an A-minus because the most looked-up word in 2004 was "blog," not "bloggers." A blog is defined by Merriam-Webster as "a boring, self-indulgent and apparently endless diatribe on a Web site managed by megalomaniacal geeks suffering from AND (attention necessity disorder)."

Actually, that's my definition. Merriam-Webster offers a kinder, gentler -- yet less accurate -- definition.

Those of us who use words for a living look forward to M-W's annual list of most looked-up words. They often say a lot about what is on people's minds, and it's often pretty scary. For instance, "peloton" and "defenestration," two words that don't exactly trip lightly off the lip, pop up on the list for 2004.

I would have assumed "peloton" was a kind of weapon fired by the Starship Enterprise at Klingons. Wrong. A peloton is a group of bicycle riders, mainly, but a group of anything in the abstract. I suspect some smarty-pants television commentator covering the Tour de France referred to a group of riders as a "peloton" instead of a "group of riders." That apparently sent a peloton of race-watchers to their computers to see what the hell a peloton was. Had American bike champ Lance Armstrong not been involved in the race, we might have safely gotten through 2004 without peloton raising its ugly head.

"Defenestration" is another matter. The closest my digital Franklin dictionary could come to "defenestration" was "deforestation," the act of clearing away forests. So, by extrapolation I would have guessed "defenestration" is the act of clearing your neighborhood of fences. And I would have been wrong. Defenestration is "the throwing of a person or thing out of a window." But what occurred in 2004 so that this word was unleashed on the general public?

If someone used "defenestration" in my presence, I would throw that person through the nearest window. Unlike the Tour de France, there was no global sporting event featuring the chucking of people out of windows, although at least that would have been more exciting then watching a bunch (a k a peloton) of guys in Lycra pajamas peddle through the Pyrenees.

The rest of the most highly looked-up words of 2004 hint at what was happening the world: incumbent, electoral, partisan (U.S. presidential election); insurgent (Iraq fighting); hurricane (Florida storms); and cicada sovereignty (giant flying bugs attempting to take over the country).

In contrast, the words that sent people scrambling for their dictionaries in 2003 were democracy, quagmire, quarantine, matrix, marriage, slog, gubernatorial, plagiarism, outage and batten. I don't know if I could use them all in one sentence, but they'd make a hell of a movie.

"Tsunami" no doubt will be a big word for 2005, followed by the word for what people do after their house was been washed away with no government warning: "tsueverybody."