In 2016, Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf arrived early to a bit of wordplay. In a piece suggesting “Ten Slogans for the GOP in 2020,” he implied a prediction that Republicans would have decided to reject Donald Trump by the next presidential cycle. “This year’s slogan, ‘Make America Great Again,’ will be unusable,” Friedersdorf wrote. He jokingly predicted some phrases that a chastened Republican Party might use. In the No. 10 spot: “Lo Siento, Latinos!” In 8th: “An elephant must sometimes forget.” And the top entry: “Hindsight Is 2020.”
A couple of things brought me back to this post. It had turned out to be pretty badly wrong. Growth in Latino support for Trump was one of the big takeaways of the 2020 contest. Immigration barely came up. And the GOP wasn’t running away from its 2016 record. Its candidate was the same guy, and he ran on almost the exact same slogan, ”Keep America Great,” and with less distance than ever between the president as a personality and the party as an institution.
In my extremely word-obsessed mind, I was actually more shocked to find the gag prediction on the 20/20 vision formulation and the year 2020 turn out wrong. With 2020 in actual hindsight now, I can admit that I was kind of dreading the 2020 puns when the year began. But there was precious little of it. The United Nations did plan the “Vision 2020” conference, a plan to fly jets of gasbag bureaucrats to a summit in support of climate “action.” Yet, apart from that, what actually happened to words in 2020 was totally unpredictable from a 2016 vantage — or, for that matter, 2019.
Take, for example, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year feature, which perennially reminds me that Samuel Johnson’s masterpiece rests in bad hands. Oxford’s words of the year supposedly “reflect the ethos, mood or preoccupations” of their period while being inscribed for having “lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.”
For 2019, as I covered, the Oxford English Dictionary maintained “an all-environmental theme to its nominations. ‘Climate emergency’ emerged victorious from a shortlist that includes ‘climate action,’ ‘climate crisis,’ ‘climate denial,’ ‘flight shame,’ ‘eco-cide,’ and ‘extinction.’” Needless to say, this choice is not scoring well on the test of time. “Flight shame” already means something quite different than it did then. And per the New York Times, “In March, as the pandemic took hold, the frequency of the word ‘climate’ itself abruptly plunged by almost 50%.”
For 2020, Oxford simply punted at epitomizing the zeitgeist (German for “ghost of the times,” literally). As the New York Times reports, “This year, Oxford Languages, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has forgone the selection of a single word in favor of highlighting the coronavirus pandemic’s swift and sudden linguistic impact on English.”
The Oxford report on word changes is, overall, just bleak and somewhat unnecessarily so. Even the New York Times sounds wistful for its preferred brand of insufferable woke wordplay: “Most years, a lot of the fun of Oxford’s short list comes from portmanteaus, or blend words, like ‘mansplain’ or ‘broflake.’” At the beginning of 2021, the new Congress was gaveled in with a prayer ended by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver with the absurd construction of “amen … and a-women.”
This seems to me like an early contender for the word of this year. I’m excited to find out how, inevitably, my prediction fails.
