THE YEAR’S END is a time for reflection, for an accounting, a reckoning. It is a time for measuring our achievements against our hopes and expectations, as well as those of others. It’s a time for hope and a time for resolve.

But above all it is a time for lists. Best lists. Worst lists. Up lists. Down lists. In lists. Out lists. Lists of new year’s resolutions. Lists of lists.

The list, in its purest form, offers a simple, cardinal assessment of the year past. Properly executed, it can capture the Zeitgeist. The list can become an instant document of social history, an insight into the transient values and mores of modern times. But most important of all, the list is an opportunity for unimaginative columnists to fill valuable space in a newspaper when there’s no real news happening.

So here’s mine. It’s fairly unusual, I think, if not unique. But what matters is that it’s mine. It’s a list of words that entered popular discourse in 2005.

Katrina

When some bored meteorologist picked the name of his cousin’s girlfriend’s mother as the moniker for the eleventh tropical storm of the Caribbean season this summer he had no idea what he had wrought. The word would come to denote not just a storm, a natural disaster, but a human tragedy, a political event and more, much more. It became a signifier of ineptitude, gross mismanagement, arrogance on an Olympian scale. For the rest of the world, it became a synonym for everything that was wrong with America, from its callous, disdainful President to its irresponsible ignorance of global warming to its racially and economically divided rotten heart.

It would be, in some of the more flowery journalism, a caesura, a dividing line in the Bush presidency; even, perhaps, in American history itself, a time when America beat its breast at the evils of its own society and embraced wonderful European-style socialism. In Europe, of course, natural disasters never happen.

Well, maybe not. But I should say that, in what must rank as one of the cruellest and least expected pieces of verbal collateral damage of all time, the choice and circumstances it captured rendered it impossible for anyone, ever again, to play a song by the 1980s band Katrina and the Waves. School discos will never be the same.

Rendition

Talking of rendering, this one must rank as euphemism of the year. According to the dictionary it means making someone or something over to someone else. But in 2005 it became notorious as the term used by the US to describe what it does when it hands over suspected terrorist suspects and other enemies to third countries that are rather less scrupulous about human rights than we are.

The term used was in fact extraordinary rendition, which sounds even better, almost sacramental. “He was given extraordinary rendition last night” conjures up an image of a dying man being blessed by a priest with chrism and oil of catechumens. In fact it means he was strapped into a cargo plane and was heading for a long and animated conversation with some of the more imaginative members of the Saudi secret police.

Intelligent design

This too sounds harmless, the kind of phrase you might use to describe Sven-Göran Eriksson’s enterprising use of the back four in the World Cup qualifiers. But it too became a sobriquet that connoted America’s general backwardness and awfulness in 2005.

It is the pseudoscientific theory that says nature is so complex that it couldn’t simply have evolved but must be the work of some superior mind or being (that’s where it parts company with Eriksson, by the way). Its proponents, mostly evangelical Christians, wanted it to be taught in state schools alongside the more conventional scientific theory of evolution.

It swept America briefly in 2005, as school districts in the darker parts of the interior rejected Darwinism and embraced the light. But it won’t last. 2005 was probably the high point of ID. Americans are, despite the caricatures, perfectly intelligent.

Non! Nee!

The words resoundingly uttered by the voters of France and the Netherlands in response to the question from the European Union: “Do you want more of us, in your face, for ever and ever?”

The word, in any language, had struggled for centuries to break free from its negative connotations, but thanks to the referendums this year it became an expression of liberty, the rallying cry of peoples yearning to breathe free from bureaucratic oppression. Of course, we know better now. Thanks to my new European Commission-English Dictionary, I now understand that the words actually mean “Yes! A thousand times yes!”

Sensitivity chip

Jennifer Aniston uttered this neologism when describing her former husband, Brad Pitt, from whom she split this year. The marriage had been impossible, she said, because he didn’t have one. What she meant was that he was thoughtless and selfish, unsolicitous of her feelings, uncaring, brusque and self-absorbed. What she meant by this, I think, was that he was a man.

iPod

All right, I know this isn’t 2005-specific but it qualifies for this list because it became so universal this year. And furthermore, in 2005 it became so much more than a brand name for an electronic device. Sociologists will talk for ever now of the iPod generation, solipsistic, introverted, used to demanding and getting their own, customised version of everything. Combine this with a society made up of people whose sensitivity chips have been removed and you are headed for serious trouble.

But finally, a more uplifting note:

Santo Subito

When I first saw these words on banners held aloft by mourners at the funeral of Pope John Paul II, I was puzzled. “Who the hell was St Subito?” I wondered. The patron saint of table football? A religious icon you prayed to when you were in a real hurry?

It turned out of course that it meant “St Immediately”, meaning the late, great Pope should be canonised expeditiously, without having to go through the usual time-consuming procedures. I suspect they’ll be granted their wish. Subito.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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