Forget about TV, radio, music or books as the place where new buzzwords and slang are coined. As the New York Times points out, everybody knows that the real action is happening online: "Now the great conduit is the blogosphere, both a neologism itself and an uncharted space that, the more we map it, looks more and more like our collective unconscious. It dreams up the new words and disseminates them directly into the language, no longer by IV but by instant messaging - a term, by the way, that may soon require its own retronym: messengered message."

With that in mind, Charles McGrath of the New York Times takes a look back at the "more persistent and inventive words" that managed to filter into the cultural mainstream during 2004.