The election campaign in the US has brought to the fore a number of critical issues for that country and onlookers around the world. Chief among them being the fact Americans turned a point in their history, faced with the choice of a black man for president on one hand and a woman as vice-president on the other.

Ivory tower and armchair intellectuals joined the men and women in the street to speculate on the cultural, sociological, economic, psychological, international, and oh yes, political, impact of one of the most riveting races to the White House to date.

Not to be outdone are the linguists and pseudo-linguists (a denotative term for the connotative phrase "word-maker-upper"). Words that seemed to be specially coined for the 2008 election made the rounds as the candidates went on the hustings. Some of these neologisms look like perfectly good words that may take up their own place in the dictionary as soon as the next publications go to press. As a matter of fact, there are others that were in the dictionary long before the Obama/McCain contest got going in earnest, though they seem specially minted for the presidential candidates.

Recently, Wordsmith, an online community which is a favourite of mine - and a reputed half-million other readers who share a love for words, wordplay, language, and literature - posted a selection of such words. Have you ever heard of obambulate? What about bidentate? Or meeken? What's a palinode?

According to Anu Garg, Wordsmith's founder, the timely offerings were legitimate dictionary words long before the candidates were born.

Obambulate is a verb which means to walk about, and is a Latin derivative with the first print citation of the word dating back to 1614. Barrack, as a verb means to shout in support: to cheer; or to shout against: to jeer. Its noun form is a building used to house soldiers. So according to the online researcher, the verb originates from the Northern Ireland dialectal barrack (to brag) while the noun takes its sense from the Romance languages. In Spanish barraca means hut. Students of literature remember it being immortalised in the title of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez' famous novel, La Barraca.

In New Mexico, the new word on the street for Spanish speakers, we are told, is "obamanos" that is loosely translated to mean, "Let's go with Obama". Mr Obama's wife, Michelle, previously appeared on TV, a month ago, quipping that she's an "Obama Mama". So the campaign machinery wasn't the only one churning out the political neologisms.

At slate.com, a daily magazine on the Web, a site owned by The Washington Post Company, the editors and readers have been busy compiling "obamaisms", and their book, Obamamania! The English Language, Barackafied, in Trade Paperback published June 24, 2008, is currently retailing online at US$9.95. This publication follows on their Encyclopedia Baracktannica, released in February and which excited the imagination of more than 800 readers who wrote in with their own entries.

What's in a word? A great deal, as our political scene can testify. In Jamaica we've mastered the art of crafting new words and phrases to suit the times. The political trail of the 1970s yielded its own thesaurus in which "heavy manners" and its derivatives created such buzz that they came to describe a range of ideas including political and social relations as well as the economy.

A friend recalls a certain disingenuous student presenting her with an assignment that literally followed the instruction to answer the given question "using your own words". That creative effort was duly penalised.

Yet as sociolinguists will point out, language is dynamic. That dynamo energised the US election campaign in the media and on the streets. By extension, it gave a charge, across the nation, to interest in words and their meanings. What a thing!

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