As 2017 goes the way of the Titanic, it’s time to survey the lexical flotsam and jetsam bobbing in its wake. Which arcana drifted to the surface this year, much to our puzzlement? Which new coinages made it to the life rafts and can expect to keep afloat? Which flared brightly and then fizzled, like distress signals?
Linguaphiles, welcome aboard that lifeboat on the troubled waters of language, The Weekly Standard’s Second Annual Word of the Year Awards. Last year’s winner forced itself into the boat without being invited—but that was only appropriate. Nothing captured the alt-right mentality better than cuckservative, with its taunt that moderation is unmanly and certain conservative males are cuckolds.
How quickly a year passes. By the end of 2017, it was clear that Homo politicus, like his allies in Hollywood and the media, tends not towards cuckoldry but a 21st-century equivalent of the droit du seigneur. Our elites have triggered us. The workspace is no safe space.
This was a year of sex and of course gender, too, because sex is what you’re born with and gender is what you make of it—except for the occasions when sex is what you coerce from interns, secretaries, and people looking for a job. Perhaps the famous sleazes who fell like dominoes in the wake of the Weinstein Affair should be ranked in a weasel tier?
So no surprise that Merriam-Webster crowned feminism its Word of the Year. The year began with the Women’s March and the pussy hat. It seems to have ended with lots of students looking up feminism as they worked on term papers. Given that Merriam-Webster’s top lookup for 2016 was fascism—at least until the dictionary company campaigned asking its users to search for an alternative and surreal took the lead—we may infer that the sky did not fall in 2017, though the year closed with the increasingly surreal Mueller inquiry ongoing and nobody any clearer about allegations of collusion with Russia.
Merriam-Webster’s result reflects only the number of searches in its online dictionary. Quantity matters, especially when it takes the form of an iceberg or, in the cases of Al Franken, Roy Moore, and John Conyers, plausible claims of sexual harassment. But the quantity of online searches does not necessarily reflect the quality of linguistic usage or curiosity.
When that old favorite the casting couch made an encore this year, people already knew what it meant. They had a general understanding of feminism too, but they had to look it up because the intersectionality of sex, gender, class, and race has complicated the term to Rubik’s Cube-like complexity.
Saturday Night Live launched Complicit, a mock perfume from the Ivanka Trump brand, and the joke turned complicit into Dictionary.com’s top search term of the year. We will never know if the searchers were saying #MeToo to Ivanka Trump’s line “I don’t know what it means to be complicit” or if they really didn’t know what the word meant. Xenophobia was the website’s 2016 winner, though who now remembers why that was?
How, then, to pluck the bedraggled survivors from the roiling sea of usage? One way would be to hire a polling firm, cross-reference its results with a sociological databank, and assemble a national picture of linguistic innovation, weighted for age, income, and voting records. Another way would be to ask the editorial staff of The Weekly Standard. That’s what I did. Sad!
The year 2017 saw antifa do their best to impose their squad goals so we would all become suitably woke. Anyone who queried the virtue of #BLM (Black Lives Matter) got a clapback and was disinvited from the #Resistance. A clapback, I discovered this week, is not a revenge gonorrhea infection but the delivery of repartee so scathing that the recipient is stunned into submission. (Merriam-Webster explained the word using lyrics from rappers’ “diss tracks.”)
This was also the year when we learnt that almost all human expression is wrong, because it is cultural appropriation. That means squad goals and clapback are out unless you’re on Black Twitter. (Didn’t know that squad goals, popularized most by Taylor Swift, has its roots in black culture? You’re probably a victim of whitesplaining.) Similarly, phrases beginning Mother of All may only be used by people of Iraqi descent, as that phrase entered English after Saddam Hussein entered Kuwait. The exception to this rule is Mother of All Parliaments. This may only be used by British people or, in extremis, Cary Grant impersonators.
On the bright side, non-Greeks may say gyro, as in the hero sandwich, not the gyroscope. After Jimmy Fallon and the country singer Luke Bryan performed a song on The Tonight Show called “I Don’t Know How to Pronounce Gyro,” the numbers of viewers who also didn’t know sent gyro to number seven on the Dictionary.com charts.
It was a good year for compound nouns but a bad year for men who wear bathrobes to business meetings. Sports got political with anthem kneeling, the political got paranoid with deep state, and sportsmen, politicians, and Shitty Media Men worried about inappropriate contact. Meanwhile, the digital news churn whipped together triple-plays like Trump Muslim Retweet.
Word of the Year 2017, though, has to be pervnado. It’s a new term for an old problem and perfect for the 12 months in which Google’s top search term was Hurricane Irma and its top individual name search was Matt Lauer.
Will pervnado just blow through the American language or will it funnel its way into a permanent place in the lexicon? It is entirely possible that the next tsunami of smut will deposit a new term for the devastation and revulsion that it leaves in its wake. We do, however, now possess an umbrella term to describe the shift in accountability and morality that is taking place—and the alterations in public posture demanded from the contrite and those attempting preemptive contrition. That term appeared in the last weeks of the year, and it wins Phrase of the Year 2017: the Great Awokening.
This phrase seems to have originated on Twitter, then migrated into old media in November via NBC reporter Benjy Sarlin. The spirit of the Great Awakening survives in digital form, and the communities of the elect are revived in the factions of social media. Sanctity mingles with sanctimony, revelation and the call to redemption with score-settling and moral coercion.
Best of all, no one seems to know whence pervnado and the Great Awokening came. American English has endured a long dose of piety and euphemism, but users of the language have not succumbed to the cure. Instead, digital media have let loose a riot of impertinence. The people have spoken. They are disgusted, but they still have a sense of humor, and they know that ridicule is nothing more than the elites deserve. It’s enough to give you hope for democracy—almost.
Have a lit 2018, and stay woke on New Year’s Eve if you can.
Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
