Hard News: Public Address Word of the Year 2018
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and because it's coming from all quarters lately:
transmisogyny
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Ireland
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STRIKE!
And if that doesn't work STRIKE AGAIN!
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Demonstration - as in the French manifestation
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Trump.
I'm so over it but he's ubiquitous. -
Robert Mueller
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Leak
Featured in the media all year, but especially in the second half. Not a new word of course, but for sheer prominence, must be a contender.
Tape
Nominated in the sub-category of "Misused/Outdated Word of the Year". Various recordings have been in the news, none of which are on tape, but we baby-boomers like to cling to our ancient vocabulary, and we run the media, so there.
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bluewave
First Child
fiasco -
Mahi
I think this was the year that the Maori word for work attained mainstream usage, along with a few others. You'll now hear mahi uttered on prime time news, often still followed by a translation to English, just in case. -
As the year staggers to an end, it has to be ‘smocking’
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linger, in reply to
Though, as you note, that's part of a more general trend, which argues against singling mahi out. I've been on sabbatical in NZ this year after 20 years away, and have been feeling a bit Rip van Winklish to see the te reo loanwords I didn't know that have become mainstream.
Even the macron has seen a surge in use (partly championed by Stuff), up from 0% in 1986 and around 30% online in the 2000s. (Possibly it reflects everyone now being able to use Google Translate and other online resources to check accuracy of loanword forms and meanings? Against which, my spellchecker then keeps annoyingly "correcting" them back to [other] English words, e.g. "te reo" becomes "the roe". So it's not entirely better living through technology.)
So -- with a side nod to French politics -- how about Macron? -
BREXIT
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mark taslov, in reply to
‘smocking’
The furor over that usage by liberals indicates to me how much of a malignant influence Trump has been both on the right and the left. He came to office mocking disabled people, two years later he has the anglosphere deriding his literacy issues – which was always on the cards.
The Flesch-Kincaid scale had him at forth to fifth grade during his campaign, now stuck on forth grade based on analysis of the first 30,000 words uttered while in office – the lowest of any US President on record.
Whether it was a typo, a troll, an autocorrect fail or an indication of the limitations of his literacy, suffice to say things aren’t getting any easier for folk with developmental reading disorders in this climate.
And it’s strange, because as we ridicule the literacy of individuals, what we’re also doing is shining a light onto the limitations of our own education systems and the meritocratic individualism they instill – i.e. those that are best served; flourish. Whereas those that are failed; deserve their lot in life.
Which in its way helps explain the global impasse we’ve strapped ourselves into.
nominating: elitism
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Rachel Prosser, in reply to
Agreed! This has been a year when more and more Māori words and phrases became much more commonly used
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thoughts and prayers
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This is the year that several 'new' words have become commonly used, often in a negative way eg cis, TERF, woke, social justice warriors, virtue signalling.
But I prefer the positive. I like that suggestion above for Neve. A new word to the NZ lexicon which means new life and hope.
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mark taslov, in reply to
cis
I may be wrong about this, but I think it may have something to do with the Trump administration’s attempts to ban transgender people from serving in the US military, the Trump administration’s intention to define trans people out of existence by employing genetic testing to strip federal recognition of the gender identity of some 1.4 million Americans, the ongoing onslaught against trans people by the British media and closer to home the localisation of these campaigns by mainstream media, weighed up against the cis population’s ongoing patronage, and perceived tacit support for most of this. In a similarly emotive – but far from identical – manner to how we’ve seen the term ‘white’ being used in a negative way.
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No collusion.
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Vicarious trauma
Recreational grief.
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Kindness
It's how we're distinguishing ourselves from the trash-fire of the rest of the world -
Plasticban or Plasticfree
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simon g, in reply to
thoughts and prayers
An early favourite, I think.
Have we had Backstop yet?
(Also, I vote against people's names being included, unless they've been turned into words, like Jacindamania).
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Geoff Lealand, in reply to
Mark; you are rather labouring the point. I nominated ‘smocking’ because it occured twice in his tweet, and both times in upper case. Difficult to attribute to anything other than Trump’s carelessness in communications and further demonstration of his ingrained stupidity. Perhaps he would consider ‘smoking’ to be false spelling.
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I like ‘kindness’ too, as an antidote to prevailing horrors.
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