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Welcome to another mini-cast from Away With Words.

I'm Grant Barrett. The 19th annual Word of the Year vote will be held by the American Dialect Society in January. It's the grand daddy of all

the word of the year votes, the longest running, the most academic, and the most fun.

And as we approach January 9th in San Francisco, we'll be talking here in these many cast about

some of the likeliest candidates.

One very odd one that caught our eye was nuke the fridge. Putting it politely it means to exhaust the possibilities or merits of a movie franchise.

Putting it negatively it means to destroy a movie franchise through the hubris and arrogance of a successful producer or director.

The term was coined based upon a scene in the latest Indiana Jones movie in which the

hero survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator.

Nuclear fridge is patterned after jumped the shark,

which was coined a few years ago to refer to anything

that had peaked in popularity or quality and it was now on a downward slide.

Jumping the shark referred to an episode of the sitcom Happy Days, and in which Fonzi

water skied over a shark, a moment thought by Happy Day's aficionados, there are such things, to be

the surest sign of the show's decline.

That's all about Nuke the Fridge.

Next week we'll talk about Ground Game. For Away With Words, I'm Grant Barrett.

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