2020’s unprecedented vocabulary
It is time once again to discuss “Words of the Year.”
Normally when writing a column like this, I make some comment about the “calendar betraying me,” or how the months are zipping by. Not now. Not this year. This year cannot end fast enough. Before discussing the major dictionaries’ choices for Word of the Year, I would like to reveal that I do have my own suggestion for 2020. Unfortunately, this word cannot be printed in a family newspaper.
Up first is the venerable Merriam-Webster’s choice. It is almost anticlimactic in its banality: “pandemic.” Of course the main driver for determining the winner is lookup rates, which for this word according to info from Merriam-Webster’s website increased 4,000 percent from 2019.
Coming from the Greek roots of “pan” meaning “all” and “demos” meaning “of the people,” Webster’s defines it as, “an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affects a significant proportion of the population.”
Other contenders for Webster’s were “coronavirus” and “quarantine” (naturally), “Kraken” and interestingly enough, “irregardless,” which could quite possibly be a subject for a column all its own.
“Pandemic” was also the 2020 choice of Dictionary.com. Some of its runners-up were “asymptomatic,” “PPE,” “quarantine” and “anti-masker.”
The Collins Dictionary, based in Glasgow, Scotland, chose “lockdown,” defined as “the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interactions and access to public spaces.” Other words on its shortlist were “furlough,” “social distancing” and “TikToker.”
The Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, in an unprecedented (the word “unprecedented” also had a banner year in various contexts) move did not chose a single Word of the Year for 2020. Instead, it released through Oxford Languages a 38page report, available for download in PDF — “2020 Words of an Unprecedented Year” — that discusses many words in wide use this year including most of the aforementioned.
From the introduction: “The English language, like all of us, has had to adapt rapidly and repeatedly this year. Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.”
This “wordy” report also has plenty of colorful graphics and should please logophiles everywhere. Some of the words examined were “covidiot,” “BLM,” “wet market,” “Zoombombing,” “wokeness,” “superspreader” and “cancel culture.”
While researching this subject, I came across a Linkedin post by Arianna Huffington in which she rejected all of the dictionary choices and proposed her own pick, “resilience,” defined by the OED as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.”
Sound good to me. Come to think of it perhaps we should all choose an individual positive “Word of the Year” to help put this year in the rear-view mirror.