My favorite end-of-year "best of" list is compiled by the American Dialect Society, which votes at its annual meeting in early January to identify the words in our extraordinarily rich English language that best characterized the year just ended.

Its Word of the Year for 2007 was "subprime," as in the class of risky mortgages at the root of the current financial crisis. Other honorees included the now-dated phrase "have a wide stance," which recalled the defense of Republican Senator Larry Craig, as he sought to deny the charge that he had been reaching out with his feet to solicit sex in a men's bathroom, and the too-clever Googlegänger, which is the name for the other people whose Web pages come up when you Google yourself, as in the sentence: "My Googlegänger sells wireless communications equipment in Virginia" (which is true, by the way).

So here are my nominations for the Word of the Year 2008:

We begin with the whole class of words beginning with the prefixes Barack- or Obama- to refer to persons or passions aroused by the charismatic junior senator from Illinois who is now our president-elect. The editors of the online magazine, Slate, have published a whole book full of these, but some of my favorites include: Baracknaphobia, the irrational fear of an Obama presidency, and Baracktogenarian, which means octogenarians for Obama, of course.

There is also Obamacon, which refers to a pledge of support made to a left-wing cause subsequently recanted by Obama, as in the sentence: "When he agreed to keep Bush's appointee Robert Gates as his defense secretary, I began to wonder whether his anti-war stance was just another Obamacon, like his support for campaign finance reform." Actually, an Obamacon is a conservative intellectual supporter of Obama's candidacy; only two were known to exist, blogger Andrew Sullivan and legal scholar Douglas Kmiec.

The people at Merriam-Webster already have picked "bailout" and "change" as their words for the year, but neither seems right to me.

Though it was the buzzword of the presidential campaign that occupied eleven-twelfths of the year, "change" always struck me as a vacuous, empty slogan.

Since President George Bush wasn't running for re-election, we were necessarily going to have change in the White House. Nor are all changes for the better, which is why it is foolish to demand "change," without specifying the particular changes one wants.

Bailout is a good word -- colorful, evocative and reasonably specific -- and we've heard it a lot this year. But I'm troubled by the way its metaphorical use contradicts its underlying sense. In its original usage, to bail out a ship is to dump out the waters threatening to sink it, but as a financial metaphor, to bail out a firm is to shovel in the great piles of cash needed to save it from going under.

For me, the word of 2008 is a different word now used metaphorically in relation to the financial markets: meltdown. Although the word was apparently used in connection with the melting of frozen ice cream as early as the 1930s, it got its modern sense in the nuclear age. That's when it came to mean a nuclear reactor accident that produces so much heat that the reactor melts through the floor of its concrete and steel containment structure, poisoning the earth, water and air for miles around.

As someone old enough to remember the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in Pennsylvania in 1979 (and the different, but scarier, Chernobyl nuclear accident), a meltdown is one of the scariest disasters I can envision. It suggests a complex process gone out of control, producing irreparable damage by spreading invisible but extraordinarily dangerous radiation for miles around.

It is, in short, a perfect image for the state of the credit markets and our financial sector as a whole. Though one sees the phrase "stock market meltdown," words such as "crash" or "nosedive" or even the ungainly verb "to crater" better capture the precipitous decline in prices we've seen this year.

The financial sector, however, has had a meltdown, radiating its poisonous rays of distrust and despair throughout our economy. We know that the old system can't be rebuilt as it was, and that just cleaning up the damage will be inconceivably expensive.

If it is right to say that financial system has suffered a meltdown, there at least a silver lining: it is a disaster that can happen only once.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American Constitutional Law and chairman of the Department of Government at Colby College in Waterville.