The meaning of the words of the year

CAMBRIDGE DICTIONARY recently selected “nomophobia” as its word of the year, via a poll of readers. Those lucky enough not to have heard of this condition are nonetheless probably familiar with its symptoms: it refers to the fear of not having your mobile phone. The choice seems almost quaint; the concept is neither peculiar to 2018 (it is years older than that) nor especially hot. Your columnist had never heard of the term before the announcement.

But it says a lot that the selection is one of the least depressing made for 2018, another year in which the most notable new or newly zeitgeisty English words correspond to a wave of insults and anxieties in the Anglophone world. Collins, another dictionary publisher, chose “single-use” as its word of the year, referring to disposable plastics that make their ways into landfills and seas. Britain in particular is newly conscious of such noxious rubbish after the success of “Blue Planet II”, a BBC documentary series about the oceans.

From there things get more poisonous still. Oxford Dictionaries chose “toxic” as its emblem for 2018. That word has come to be attached to many others: toxic masculinity, toxic homosociality (male bonding through awful behaviour), toxic debates over things like transgender rights. And Oxford’s shortlist of other contenders was nearly as bleak. It included “gaslighting” (trying to make someone doubt their own memory or even sanity) and “incel” (self-described “involuntarily celibate” men, an increasing number of whom have taken to violence).

A kind of opposite of “toxic” has also had a big year: fragility, as in “white fragility”. This refers to the inability (or alleged inability) of whites to handle claims of racism perpetrated against non-whites, so that they panic when the subject is brought up, shutting down discussions about discrimination, privilege and worse. Coming out of the academic school of “critical race theory”, white fragility has given birth to “male fragility”, “cis fragility” (on the part of people who are not transgender), and so on.

Dictionary.com made an interesting choice with “misinformation” as its word of the year. Why not “disinformation”? One editor explained that disinformation refers to an intentional effort to spread lies; misinformation is the spreading of false information with or without that intent. In other words, Russian troll farms engage in disinformation; when unwitting Americans share those posts, that’s misinformation—which, in the end, is the bigger problem. This, too, feels older than 2018, though. “Post-truth” was Oxford’s pick in 2016.

Several other groups are yet to name their words of the year. What else might they consider? Brexit was a source of many new words or applications. The “backstop” meant to prevent the reimposition of a hard border in Ireland is a new use for an old word. “Gammon” as a way of insulting older red-faced male Brexit supporters has the virtue of being creative, and the downside of being a sneer based on skin colour. “Cakeism” might be the most useful. After Boris Johnson, one of Brexit’s figureheads, declared that he was “pro having [cake] and pro eating it”, cakeism has neatly summed up Brexiteers’ refusal to face trade-offs.

American politics has seen words rapidly changing in their valency after being coined by adherents of one party and then being adopted and flipped by the other. In 2016 “fake news” meant news that was fake; Donald Trump seized on that and distorted it to mean true news he didn’t like. Hillary Clinton ill-advisedly referred to “deplorables” among Mr Trump’s supporters during their presidential contest; his fans eagerly adopted the name. American conservatives taunt left-wing youth as “snowflakes”, a name they have in turn reappropriated with Twitter handles like “Iron Snowflake”. Those who voted for Remain in Brexit have done the same with “Remoaner”.

So if there is any good news in the cascade of abuse it is that, like so much slang in circulation today, any word popular enough to sum up the mood of a year will saturate social media so quickly that it will soon lose its bite. Or it might be ironically appropriated by the very people it was meant to insult—an old phenomenon, but now manifest at breakneck speed. Social-media tastemakers prize playfulness, ironic detachment—and novelty. In other words, if you are depressed by the vituperations of 2018, be consoled. Most will seem old in 2019, and be history by 2020.