‘Populism’ is Cambridge’s ‘word of the year’

LONDON: The word “populism” has been declared the Cambridge Dictionary 2017 Word of the Year, based on the criteria that the word should be among the most searched and also reflected in spikes — occasions when a word is suddenly looked up many more times than usual on or around a particular date.

The dictionary defines populism as “political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want”.

A release by the University of Cambridge said that even as Donald Trump was being sworn in as the US president on January 22, searches for the word “inauguration” on its online dictionary spiked.

But so did searches for the word “populism” because, on that same day, Pope Francis warned against a rising tide of populism in a widely reported interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais.

In mid-March, after another high-profile inter- view with the pontiff – this time with the German newspaper Die Zeit – searches for populism spiked again.

Wendalyn Nichols of Cambridge University Press said: “Spikes can reveal what is on our users’ minds and plenty of spikes can be directly connected to news items about politics in the US (nepotism, recuse, bigotry, megalomania) and the UK (shambles, untenable, extradite).

“What sets populism apart from all these other words is that it represents a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent.”

The dictionary definition of populism includes the usage label “mainly disapproving”.

The release said: “Populism has a taint of disapproval because the -ism ending often indicates a philosophy or ideology that is being approached either uncritically (liberalism, conservatism, jingoism) or cynically (tokenism).”