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Oxford's 2020 Word of the Year? It's Too Hard to Isolate (nytimes.com) 38

Posted by msmash from the 2020 dept.
Oxford Languages's annual Word of the Year is usually a tribute to the protean creativity of English and the reality of constant linguistic change, throwing a spotlight on zeitgeisty neologisms like "selfie," "vape" and "unfriend." Sure, it isn't all lexicographic fun and frolic. 2017 saw the triumph of "toxic." Last year, the winner was "climate emergency." But then came 2020, and you-know-what. From a report: 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. "What struck the team as most distinctive in 2020 was the sheer scale and scope of change," Katherine Connor Martin, the company's head of product, said in an interview. "This event was experienced globally and by its nature changed the way we express every other thing that happened this year."

The Word of the Year is based on usage evidence drawn from Oxford's continually updated corpus of more than 11 billion words, gathered from news sources across the English-speaking world. The selection is meant "to reflect the ethos, mood or preoccupations" of the preceding year, while also having "lasting potential as a term of cultural significance." The 2020 report does highlight some zippy new coinages, like "Blursday" (which captures the way the week blends together), "covidiots" (you know who you are) and "doomscrolling." But mostly, it underlines how the pandemic has utterly dominated public conversation, and given us a new collective vocabulary almost overnight.
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Oxford's 2020 Word of the Year? It's Too Hard to Isolate More

Oxford's 2020 Word of the Year? It's Too Hard to Isolate

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  • It was probably a tossup between "Zoom" and "maskhole".

  • I'm sorry, but this one seems totally obvious to me: Coronavirus. Pretty much other possible word of the year was due to that word.

    • Nah... the reality is they didnt want the flack of the word that everything revolved around this year "fucked"

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Actually the word is "2020". It is now a verb that has the same meaning as the word you mentioned, optionally followed by "up". As in:

        Man, you really 2020ed that project.

        If we don't get coronavirus under control, we're all 2020ed.

        Murder hornets? That's really 2020ed.

    • I'm sorry, but this one seems totally obvious to me: Coronavirus. Pretty much other possible word of the year was due to that word.

      Even better:

      Wuflu. Or Chinavirus.

      Not trolling. A word that basically combines everything that has sucked or we've argued about over this awful year.

      But for me it would be Glioblastoma or Divorce. Fuck 2020.

      • I think those might not be as worldwide common as they have been in your experience. Although having said that, I've literally never heard of blursday and if I did hear somebody say it I feel like I'd have to kick their ass just as hard as if they said they had a case of the Mondays.

      • Dictionaries do not define language, they record language that is already in use. Nobody (to a first approximation) uses those terms. Since they have not caught on, dictionaries will not record them.

        But yes, fuck 2020.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      I went to Google trends and compared the use of Coronavirus to many of the other words listed by Oxford as influential words. Nothing even came close to Coronavirus. It was beating most words' usage by a factor of 10-50. Coronavirus even beat out the topic Election all year except for about 10 days in early November.

      Oxford must have just wanted to highlight how many new words entered our regular lexicon in 2020, because if they wanted to name a word of the year this was probably the easiest year to do that

  • But "It's Too Hard to Isolate" are five words...or six?

  • The problem is the world is in a Depression, and more than just an Economic Depression. But the collective world is Depressed, Scared, Anxious about many things.
    Politics, Economics, Local Affairs, Global Affairs, Family Life... Globally we are really strained. The Pandemic is the spark to this, but we around the world have been building up to this.
    Voting in leaders who are extreme Right or Extreme Left who care more about ideology than implementation, Riding on a strong economy to ignore hidden social is

    • Voting in leaders who are extreme Right or Extreme Left

      Who from the "Extreme Left" has been elected?

      who care more about ideology than implementation

      Our dysfunctional politics have been driven by populism, not ideology. Trump has advocated a mixture of stupid policies from both the right (tax cuts funded with debt) and the left (protectionism) with a dose of good old-fashioned know-nothing xenophobia. His policies have no unifying ideological framework.

      • Being a World Wide problem I wasn't just talking about the United States.
        The Left Wing politics actually have gown further the left. Much of Latin America, and Europe. Where they are pushing a lot more government controls and regulations in where it is getting difficult for many to function (Think of the Yellow Vest Revolts). The Right Wing has also gown further to the Right, seeming to want to disable all regulations where the rich and powerful are the only ones with power to function.

        Both ideologies are

        • (Think of the Yellow Vest Revolts)

          So your only example of the "extreme left" being elected are the French "Yellow Vests" ... who were never elected to anything and whose opponent (Emmanual Macron, a centrist) is in power?

          The Right Wing has also gown further to the Right

          No. The Right has grown more populist and LESS ideological.

          Trump's trade wars and immigration restrictions are the opposite of what "the rich" want.

      • Who from the "Extreme Left" has been elected?

        Vice President Elect Harris. Very likely to be President Harris within the next year or two.

  • That was an easy pick: “sh!tshow”.
    World health: sh!tshow.
    Economics: sh!tshow.
    US political status: sh!tshow.
    Environmental: sh!tshow.

    How hard was to come up with the one word about 2020? This year was a true sh!tshow anywhere you look at it.

  • The selection is meant "to reflect the ethos, mood or preoccupations" of the preceding year, while also having "lasting potential as a term of cultural significance."

    Go look up their lists for 10 or more years ago. If 1/3 are even remembered mich less in use, be surprised.

  • I don't see "covidiots" having a lasting impact, unless of course the pandemic goes on for years.

    Zoom as a verb to mean using internet-based video conferencing is probably here to stay though, much like how some people will refer to all facial tissues as Kleenex or all soda as Coke (granted, those are Americanisms and this is the Oxford English Dictionary, but still).

  • ....just like the infected.

  • "Oxford" means various things, but no-one would automatically assume it means the "Oxford Languages", or know what that is.

    "The Oxford English Dictionary" means something to most people.
    "The OED", if you must shorten it, means something to many people.

    Editors, EDIT !

  • When is the OED going to finally recognize the word "curiouser" as a legitimate word on its own?

    According to the Google NGram Viewer "curiouser" showed up in books as a word in 1800, and has never disappeared since. It has it most famous usage in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865:

    “Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).”

    Since 1900 the NGram Viewer shows that is popularity has continuously increased until today its usage is a bit less than "abattoir" but hundreds of times more common than "peristeronic”. And its usage does not stem fro

  • Based on the frequency of utterance/reading/hearing alone:
    1. Social Distancing (and then "physical distancing" because sadness)
    2. Face Covering (But not mask! That would obscure the eyes, as well.)
    3. Pandemic (Better than Coronavirus or COVID-19, in my opinion. Those are temporary. There is a history of pandemics to learn from.)

    Based on effect/impotance:
    1. Science (How about we help people understand what exactly it is...?)
    2. Skepticism or Dunning–Kruger effect (And while we're educating....)
    3. Populi

  • Isn't it obvious? Pandemic.

  • Last years was not a single word and it had an agenda, it was political.
    As usual, once you bring politics into something it all goes to hell.
  • Unprecedented is the word I kept hearing all year long. Every new broadcast, every sports program, every speaker starts or ends with some variation of "this is unprecedented"

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