The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its word of the year: hypermiling. Hypermiling, of course, is maximizing your car’s mileage by any means necessary, from simple solutions like driving barefoot (to lighten your lead foot) to putting MPG before mortality and tailgating big rigs (to minimize drag). And when you look up hypermiling in the dictionary, the guy whose picture should be there is Wayne Gerdes, the mileage master who coined the term and whom MJ entertainingly profiled nearly two years ago—way before the lexicographers caught on. And way before the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers discovered hypermiling and tried to rebrand it as “EcoDriving.” Ugh. Hopefully the Oxford word mavens will scrape the bottom of this year’s short list (staycation, tweet, hockey mom) before they immortalize that term.
