Of course it is. 2016 is the year that Britain declared its independence from the European Union—or at least it declared its intention to declare its independence. It’s the year the far right surged in France, Germany, and Austria, not to mention Turkey, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland.
So it goes without saying that the Web of Language choice for Word of the Year for 2016 is too terrible to name.
So far, other 2016 Word of the Year choices include post-truth (Oxford Dictionaries), xenophobia (Dictionary.com), and paranoid (Cambridge Dictionary), and Merriam-Webster, which has yet to announce its word of the year, reports that fascism is its leading look-up to date.
Not that there was any shortage of words in 2016: alt-right, the new umbrella term for white supremacist sexist antisemitic Islamophobes, was on everybody’s lips. Speaking of alt-right, there was dogwhistle. As well as Brexit (it means ‘Brexit,’ in case you were wondering). And let’s not forget the superhero trio, Nasty Woman, with her trusty sidekicks, BernieBro and Bad Hombre. Normalize was never going to be the 2016 Word of the Year; we just can’t let 2016 be a normal year, OK?
Email proved a big hit in 2016, what with a presidential candidate who had never been charged with an email crime being treated like she sold atomic secrets to the Russians, while a leading candidate for Secretary of State is someone who has actually been convicted of disclosing classified information to his girlfriend via email in his previous job as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Imagine our Ambassador to the World wearing an ankle bracelet. Oh, and the one person most-likely to give American secrets to the Russians? He managed to win a job in which he could collude with them even more over a secure red telephone.
So yes, all the more reason for the editors at the Web of Language to declare that their Word of the Year for 2016 is too terrible to name.
There is one word that stands apart from all this negativity: hygge, a cute Danish borrowing that nobody knows how to pronounce, meaning ‘coziness, contentment, well-being.’ Lest Americans think that hygge has a chance of becoming word of the year for 2017, President-elect Voldemort announced that when he takes office on January 20, his first official act will be to deport all foreign words. Voldemort told supporters at a rally in Ohio this week that he will build a wall around the English language, and make the lexicographers pay for it. Which they greeted with an enthusiastic chorus of, "Build the wall." And then they shouted the 2016 word of the year, the word that shall not be named.
