Good riddance to a toxic year
What kind of year has it been? Apparently a toxic one, replete with misinformation and lots of people suffering the sharp pangs of nomophobia.
If that sounds unpleasant and uncomfortable, that’s because it is. Twenty-eighteen was a low-down, dirty year, one we’re glad to see the back of, and the words chosen by lexicographers to sum it up weren’t any more positive.
Ease in with nomophobia, selected by Cambridge Dictionary in a readers’ poll as word of the year for 2018. It’s not exactly a household term, but it refers to that familiar, nagging fear of being left without your mobile phone. We’re all prisoners of technology; we love it and resent it at the same time. Hence this runner-up for word of the year: “techlash,” or the growing backlash against the big tech companies that rule our lives.
Those are mild, however, compared to other top choices for word of the year, which Oxford Dictionaries defines as the word or expression “judged to reflect the ethos, mood or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.”
Oxford picked “toxic” as its word, and it’s easy to see why. Toxic means poisonous, as in “toxic chemicals,” but lately it’s become the modifier of choice to reflect the feeling that we’re living in a world that keeps getting more and more contaminated with bad feelings of all kinds.
We fear we’re trapped in a “toxic culture” and struggling with “toxic relationships.” We may toil in a “toxic environment” where, as the #MeToo movement keeps reminding us, we may have to endure the effects of “toxic masculinity.” Then we end up in “toxic debates” over all this. Our health, mental as well as physical, is bound to suffer. It’s all pretty... toxic.
It doesn’t get any better when you consider some of the other words that made Oxford Dictionaries’ shortlist for 2018’s word of the year.
“Gaslighting” refers to making someone doubt their own sanity if they complain about, say, all the toxic stuff they have to deal with.
“Incel” — short for involuntary celibacy — describes the sad subculture of (mostly) white males who say they can’t find a romantic partner and end up living lives of lonely resentment. Talk about toxic.
“Cakeism” is all about refusing to make tough choices, as in having your cake and eating it too. Like people who want both to fight climate change and enjoy low gas prices. Somehow they fail to make the connection.
And “gammon,” an insulting label for older, red-faced men who have political opinions you disagree with. They supposedly look like ham, or gammon, as the British call it. Anyone who resorts to an insult like that is indeed stuck in a toxic debate.
Dictionary.com went in another direction for its word of the year. It chose “misinformation,” one of a growing string of significant words that reflect the fear that our political and social lives have become unmoored from old-fashioned fact-based reality.
Two years ago Oxford chose “post-truth” as its word of the year, which seemed spot-on at a moment when Donald Trump had just stunned the world by winning the White House. The previous year, Collins Dictionary nominated “fake news,” a term that has by now been so abused and over-used that it has been leached of all meaning. Even earlier there was “truthiness,” i.e. the belief that something is true even in the absence of any facts or logic to support it.
Misinformation, according to Dictionary.com, means “false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead.”
It’s distinct from “disinformation,” which involves an intentional effort to spread falsehoods, such as deliberately spreading fake news to undermine your opponent’s political system. Misinformation, goes the thinking, is more dangerous because innocently sharing those lies can do even more damage.
The lessons of all this? First, learn to put down that phone and defy nomophobia. Then resolve not to make toxic situations any worse than they have to be. And, above all, value the truth and don’t contribute to the growth of misinformation. And hope that the words of the year for 2019 will reflect a healthier world.