The word is fascism – but is that really post-truth or is it ‘truthiness’?

WASHINGTON: Fascism is poised to join an elite pool of words – among them science, integrity, socialism, bailout, truthiness and the slang interjection “w00t” – that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has selected as word of the year in the US.

The word fascism, as Merriam-Webster noted on Twitter this week, is likely to be crowned 2016’s winner. The unusually high interest in its definition over the course of the year has propelled it to the fourth-most searched word in the history of the dictionary’s website.

“Guys, 2016 is so bad it made the dictionary sad,” went one reply, capturing the general pathos prompted by Merriam- Webster’s tweet. Within two hours, Merriam-Webster said there was an uptick in searches for flummadiddle, meaning nonsense. Flummadiddle’s only fighting chance against fascism, however, was if “everyone” searched it twice a day for the rest of the year. The words of the year are more than the “most frequently looked up”, as Merriam-Webster put it in its end-of-2015 announcement. The words also “give us a window into what people are think- ing”.

Last year, people were apparently thinking about the suffix “-ism”. Fascism scored high, but socialism topped the charts. Its popularity spiked after rallies held by “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, according to the dictionary. Likewise, 2008 was the year of the bailout, as well as searches for what “bailout” meant.

This year, words like mis- ogyny and fascism have had huge bursts of interest, particularly after the US election. Users looked up fascism at a rate 400 percent higher this year than last, the dictionary said last month. In 2006, it introduced an online poll to allow users to submit and vote for the word of the year. That year, the winner was “truthiness”, a joke word coined by Stephen Colbert on The Col- bert Report in October 2005. Truthiness was followed by 2007’s “w00t,” a victory whoop popular among video-gamers in the mid-2000s. Neither w00t nor truthiness was an official inclusion in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary at the time of their victories. If fascism wins, as it seems likely to do, it will round out a cluster of bleak words for this year. In Britain the Oxford Dictionaries an- nounced that “post-truth” was this year’s word. The phrase does not mean beyond fact, but rather the sense that objective truth may be less relevant than appeals to emotion or belief.

Paranoid occupied the brains at Cambridge Dictionary. And Dictionary.com chose xenophobia – the fear of strangers, foreigners or the alien – as its word of the year. – Washington Post