Word of the year

AT THE end of the year, there are usually awards given out, and the one I always follow are the various votes for word of the year – the word that most encapsulates what happened for the year.

This year, curiously, Merriam Webster dictionary choose a word that I haven’t seen used often (like selfie), but which they believe most represents what happened in 2016. The word is “surreal”, which means very strange or unusual or having the quality of a dream.

That said, they think that this is the word that best describes many of the unpredictable events of 2016, like the British exit from EU, the Brussels and France terror attacks, the Turkish coup, or most of all, the US Presidential election.

Nearer to home, surreal can also describe the win of President Duterte. But I’m sure we have our own word of the year, which hands down has to be “put*ng ina”, which we put into the world lexicon.

For the business owners, one word constantly is up their minds is “endo”, which stands for end of contractualization. Surely, in most business meetings, this is widely debated and discussed.

For me, it can be “nostalgia”. If you look at games, you see revivals that hit the top of charts like Pokemon and Super Mario. For movies, heroes and icons of the 1970s1990s were the most popular – Star Wars, Finding Dory, Jungle Book, Captain America, Batman, Superman, Doc- tor Strange, X-men, Kung Fu Panda, Ice Age, Tarzan, Angry Birds, etc. Even Ghostbusters, Bridget Jones, Ninja Turtles, and Star Trek saw revivals, as well as an extension of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise.

Going back to the word surreal, maybe this would also describe the phenomena of Star Wars, which is introducing its eighth film. Ssuccessful films have a sequel, very successful ones have a trilogy. Only very few have more than six (apparently the only ones I could think of is Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter). As everybody might know, there is a religion that was introduced in the film called Jedi.

Believe it or not, there is a religious organization registered in Texas called the Jedi Group, and in UK, it reportedly has more than 176,000 members, as of a few years ago. So it was not surprising that I read a news item this month that the UK government just decided to reject an application to grant charitable status to a group called the Temple of the Jedi Order, ruling that the belief in the force does not translate to a belief in the spiritual principles or things that are an essential requirement for a religion in charity law.

Isn’t that surreal?