Every year, the folks at Oxford Dictionaries announce a word of the year, and the word this year is toxic. “The Oxford Word of the Year,” the release reads, “is a word or expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.”
Toxic, meaning poisonous or extremely harmful to health, used to be applied exclusively to material things such as chemicals and gases. Now, and increasingly in our world of adversarial media and crotchety protests against everything, toxic gets attached to just about anything of which the speaker or writer disapproves. We now read of toxic masculinity, toxic cultures, toxic environments, and toxic relationships.
We enjoy discussions of words and meanings as much as anybody, but this word-of-the-year business has become tiresomely political of late. In 2016, when Oxford chose post-truth as its word of the year, evidently as a commentary on Donald Trump’s habit of saying things that aren’t true, we endured a week or two of hollow commentary about how the concept of truth was somehow in danger of obsolescence (as if poststructural literary theorists, beloved of the left, hadn’t blazed that trail decades ago). This year, we expect, we’ll be subjected to a round of articles and thinkpieces about how our increasingly acrimonious politics have put the Anglophone world in a mood of existential fear, etc., etc.
What galls us about Oxford’s word of the year, though, is that Oxford’s lexicographers have spent the last half-century telling everybody that there is no authority in matters of usage and grammar. The dictionary’s only role, in this latitudinarian and “descriptivist” way of thinking, is to tell us how words are used, not to tell us how they should be used. What right, then, does Oxford Dictionaries have to tell us that one word is the word of the year and not some other? And who was it at Oxford who made the decision? A committee? The announcement’s passive-voice formulation—the winning word “is judged” to reflect the ethos of the passing year—makes it unclear. “Is judged” by whom?
We feel we have as much authority to name a word of the year as anybody at Oxford. Here’s our choice: clickbait.
