It’s an obvious game.  Nobody cares about dictionaries, so at the end of the year, dictionaries get some attention by coming up with a word of the year.  Then, because journalists are lazy, they get a column out of it. 

This is too mundane for anyone to address, but a couple of words come to mind that we use frequently, but just aren’t very descriptive.

I have a cold.  That happens all the time to everyone.  That’s too close to being cold.  If I say a head cold, that is a little better.  Doctors call it an upper respiratory infection, but that sounds too long, and could be a sinus infection, which is much worse.  Just come up with a word that is definitive and isn’t dependent on the rest of the sentence.

Dream is another one.  If someone says that they had a dream, you know a boring story is coming.  If someone says that they have a dream, you know something important is coming.

In Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, he goes on to refute everything that the modern progressive holds dear.  MLK wasn’t talking about something that came to him while he was sleeping.  He could call it a fantasy, but that sounds disjointed from reality and conjures images of dragons and heaving bosoms.  We need a word that means a future reality that we should work toward.

Does anyone have sleeping dreams of the type portrayed in media?  Those dreams are always carefree fantasies that write themselves.  Some people have vivid dreams and some have vague dreams.  People remember them, or they don’t.  Freud thought that dreams addressed an issue that came up the previous day.  That sounds more likely.

I don’t know.  The word “dream”, just sounds like a romantic notion that can be tossed into a sentence, and people can take it a bunch of different ways.