[Ads-l] The word of the year for 2016? It's too terrible to name

Baron, Dennis E debaron at ILLINOIS.EDU
Sat Dec 3 00:04:15 UTC 2016


There’s a new post on the Web of Language:


The word of the year for 2016 is too terrible to name

http://bit.ly/2giBmrc

Of course it is. 2016 is the year that Britain declared its independence from the European Union—or at least it declared its intention to declare its independence. It’s the year the far right surged in France, Germany, and Austria, not to mention Turkey, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland

So it goes without saying that the Web of Language choice for Word of the Year for 2016 is too terrible to name.

So far, other 2016 Word of the Year choices include post-truth (Oxford Dictionaries<https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/press/news/2016/11/17/WOTY-16>), xenophobia (Dictionary.com<http://blog.dictionary.com/xenophobia/>), and paranoid (Cambridge Dictionary<https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2016/11/29/cambridge-dictionarys-word-of-the-year-2016/>), and Merriam-Webster<https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster/status/803674255732813825>, which has yet to announce its word of the year, reports that fascism is its leading look-up to date.

Not that there was any shortage of words in 2016: alt-right, the new umbrella term for white supremacist sexist antisemitic Islamophobes, was on everybody’s lips. Speaking of alt-right, there was dogwhistle . . . .

read the whole post at the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/2giBmrc

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org


More information about the Ads-l mailing list