The Word on 2018? It Isn’t Good.
Apparently, 2018 was toxic. At least that is according to Oxford Dictionaries, which recently announced that “toxic” was its international word of the year.
There are citations of “toxic” from as early as 1664, but the dictionary noticed that the word has proliferated in many contexts, such as environmental poisons and today’s political discourse.
Most important, the Oxford committee said that “toxic” reflected the “ethos, mood or preoccupations” of 2018.
In fact, several words that have entered the vernacular provide a revealing look at what society has been coping with in 2018. And much of it relates to gender divi- sions and identity.
Before selecting “toxic,” Oxford had considered “toxic masculinity,” a concept that gained notoriety as part of the #MeToo movement’s exposure of bad male behavior.
Katherine Connor Martin, Oxford’s head of United States dictionaries, told The Times that there had been an explosion in the use of the phrase by news sources and blogs this year, second only to “toxic chemicals.” But then the committee realized how widespread “toxic” itself had become.
“So many different things are tied together by the word,” Ms. Martin said.
Like toxic, other Oxford contenders carry societal implications, some with sexual overtones.
“Incel,” or “involuntary celibate,” is associated with misogyny at its worst, and was linked to some horrific crimes in the past year.
After a man drove a van through a crowd in Toronto, it was reported that he identified with a group of self- described “incels,” those who blame women for denying them sex. “The incel rebellion has already begun,” the 25-year- old suspect, Alek Minassian, posted on Facebook minutes before the April attack, which killed 10 and injured more than a dozen others.
In a separate incident in early November, The Times reported that Scott Paul Beierle, 40, who also identified with “incels,” fatally shot two women before killing himself at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida. Mr. Beierle had ranted online about rejection and named women who had wronged him.
As “incel” expresses disdain for the opposite sex, another new word, “Latinx,” tries to be more accepting, rejecting gender conformity entirely.
As Concepción de León explained in her Times column, El Espace, “Latinx” is used as a broader term for the Latino community. It is “meant to be a more feminist, inclusive term that also considers transgender folks or those who don’t identify with the gender binary,” she wrote.
Merriam-Webster added “Latinx” to its dictionary in September, but not everyone is ready to accept it.
Lourdes Torres, a professor of Latino studies at DePaul University in Chicago, told The Times that Latin America is not making this change.
“They recognize that their language, like all languages, is sexist,” she said. “All languages are sexist because we live under the patriarchy everywhere.”
Inevitably, though, new words like “Latinx” will be introduced as cultures evolve.
Ed Morales, author of “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture” and a professor at Columbia University in New York, said, “I thought it was a futurist term, imagining a future of more inclusion for people that don’t conform to the various kinds of rigid identities that exist in the United States.”