Taking joy in suffering these words of the year

This is the most wonderful time of the year because I get to share more Words of the Year. Merriam-Webster went with pandemic for 2020.

As Peter Sokolowski, the Mer r i - am- Webster editor-at-large, said, “That probably isn’t a big shock.”

“It’s probably the word by which we’ll refer to this period in the future,” he told The Associated Press.

I’m not sure I knew about their process of choosing such words before, but editors get help from all of the people who look up words on the dictionary website. The dictionary analyzes the number of times people looked up the words and compare it to how many times the words were looked up in past years.

Obviously, the dictionary editors used a different method when people used actual books with pages, like in the olden days. But they didn’t specify how they once did it.

This year, on March 11, the day that the World Health Organization declared that covid-19 was a pandemic, 115,806% more people looked up the word than had in 2019.

For anyone who doesn’t know, pandemic is “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: a pandemic outbreak of a disease.”

It can be an adjective or a noun. It has Greek roots meaning “all the people.”

I think until now we were more likely to hear epidemic, which means “affecting or tending to affect a disproportionately large number of individuals within a population, community, or region at the same time.” The roots of that word mean “on or upon the people.”

A pandemic is an epidemic to the nth degree.

The Merriam-Webster editors chose 11 other words that, for the most part, define this year.

Coronavirus, quarantine and asymptomatic are, of course all related to the pandemic.

The coronavirus gets its name from scientists who thought the virus, as seen through a microscope, looked like a solar corona that we see during an eclipse. Many other coronaviruses have existed before this one, which is why this one is sometimes called the novel coronavirus. Covid-19 is a shortened form of coronavirus disease 2019, for the

year it was first identified.

On March 19, people looked up coronavirus 162,551% more times in 2020 than on the same date in 2019.

Quarantine means “a state of enforced isolation designed to prevent the spread of disease.”

Though people have probably heard or read the word many times before, people looked it up 1,856% more often in 2020 than in 2019.

Asymptomatic means having no symptoms. I’ve written about the word before because it’s too jargony. It’s easier to say, “I have no symptoms” than “I am asymptomatic.”

I was disturbed that the word schadenfreude was searched so often in 2020. It’s the enjoyment one feels when others have problems.

Merriam-Webster says it’s pronounced / SHAHdun-froy-duh/. It’s so hard to say that the word’s audio is among the words most clicked-on.

You can probably guess from the length of the word that it’s a German word. Actually, it’s from two words.

Schaden means damage and freude means joy.

I nearly always have to look this word up because I constantly forget what it means. Please don’t take any schadenfreude from that.

Two of the 2020 words came amid the protests and other reactions to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The first was defund,

which means to “withdraw funding from.” The debate on what “defunding the police” means continues.

Another was antebellum.

The word means “before the war.” In the U.S., we use it to describe the time before the Civil War. Because the word conjures up the horrors of slavery, the musical group Lady Antebellum changed its name to Lady A. “Antebellum” was also a 2020 film starring Janelle Monáe. So, people looked up that word 885% more in 2020 than in 2019.

And the word malarkey

comes to us from Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential candidacy. Biden opposes malarkey. It means nonsense, foolish talk, lies and even hogwash. People have been using the word since at least the 1920s, but no one seems to know its origin. It’s often used in the cutting phrases, “You’re full of malarkey” or “That’s a bunch of malarkey.” But you don’t hear them a lot these days.

Many noticed when Biden used the word in 2012 during a vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan. But he’s used it many times since, and his summer bus campaign was called the “No Malarkey” tour. He faced some teasing because the term is a bit outdated.

Icon was among the year’s words because of a couple of “object[ s] of uncritical devotion” we lost in 2020. Merriam-Webster cited U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With admitted bias, I’d include John Prine as a songwriting icon we lost.

Numerous people looked up mamba in January, after basketball icon Kobe Bryant, his daughter and eight others died in a copter crash in California. Mamba was the nickname Bryant gave himself. What’s a mamba? “Any of several chiefly arboreal venomous green or black elapid snakes of sub-Saharan Africa.” It’s derived from the Zulu word imamba.

Here’s what National Geographic says about black mambas: “Black mambas are fast, nervous, lethally venomous, and when threatened, highly aggressive. They have been blamed for numerous human deaths, and African myths exaggerate their capabilities to legendary proportions.”

The word kraken, to me, was the strangest of all to garner attention. A kraken is a sea monster from Scandinavian myths.

On July 23, sports fans in Seattle chose Kraken as the name of their National Hockey League team. On that day, the searches for the word increased 128,000% from the year before.

Before that, it had been a line from the 2010 movie, “Clash of the Titans.” I didn’t see the movie, but I saw the commercial, way too many times, with Zeus commanding his forces to “release the Kraken.”

Finally, one of my least favorite words, irregardless, was on the list.

Irregardless is a nonstandard word, and those who use it think it means the same as regardless, or in spite of. I don’t use it because it’s a double negative. On social media, many people were falsely saying that the dictionary had just added the word this year. They were blaming it on 2020.