Word of the year
The Oxford word of the year 2018 is “toxic.” I read the announcement on the last working day of the year, writing to meet the deadline of the last final paper of the semester with a mind already leaden from medicine taken to fight a rising fever and trying to swallow glasses of water with a throat rasping from a hard dry cough.
So, yeah, I agree with the Oxford editors on the word choice.
It’s an interesting journey for an adjective that was first used in English during the 17th century. Meaning “poisonous,” “toxic” has its roots in medieval Latin, “toxicum (poison),” which emanates from the Greek “toxikon pharmakon (bow poison).”
According to en.oxforddictionaries.com, the ancient Greeks smeared poison on their arrowheads. The poison ensured that a mere scratch from an arrow meant certain death.
However, it is not the Greek word for poison that leapt to Latin but the Greek word for bow, bringing along the same meaning associated with the lethal and deadly.
There is no explanation why this is so. The Oxford editors’ reasons behind the selection of the adjective are aptly illustrated, though, by the metaphor of a poisoned bow. Bearing deep cultural significance, the word of the year reflects the “ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year.”
In 2018, the editors noted a 45-percent increase in online searches of “toxic” on oxforddictionairies.com. These are the top 10 collocates, or pairings of “toxic” with another word, arranged in order of diminishing frequency: chemicals, masculinity, substance, gas, environment, relationship, culture, waste, algae and air.
From my sickbed, the poisoned bow shot off for two prominent destinations: traffic and the Internet.
After getting seriously sick twice the moment I am home from studying in Metro Manila, I treat urban traffic with utmost distrust. There are strains of violence lurking in daily battles of commuting. I am not just talking of the screaming, victimizing and aggressing that I witness in other people; I’m also talking of deep, hidden wells of anger and frustration I expose in myself in commuting to connect A to B.
The same goes for online connections. I’m not even referring to trolls, which I don’t engage with. Of course, in the swamp of the Internet, it’s hard to distinguish the trolls from everyone else. Negativity is to the Internet what smog is to Metro Manila, Cebu City, or any urban center.
The self-righteousness that pushes every driver to stay on course and not give up an inch on the highways is not different from the instinct to scroll, post and engage. I guess the Greeks win the point over the Romans: more lethal than poison is a vector.