Dec. 21, 2018
special to the Web of Language
The Trump administration has banned the 2017 Word of the Year.
Adding to earlier reports that the federal government will no longer be allowed to use the seven dirty words evidence-based, vulnerable, diversity, transgender, season’s greetings, climate change, and #metoo, the administration announced the cancellation of this year’s Word of the Year awards.
Sources inside the White House, speaking on condition of anonymity because they fear for their lives, report that the Department of Homeland Security has rescinded recent Word of the Year awards to feminism, fake news, populism, and youthquake, a word no one has even heard of. DHS further announced the suspension of all awards currently in the pipelines.
Aides say the president is bitter about losing the Time person of the year cover to some women he has never heard of—he is reported to have raged, “I don’t know these women, and I never touched any of them.” He is also said to be furious that he was not even a finalist for this year’s Word of the Year, which was particularly galling since he claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign that he had “all the best words.” After watching reports of Word of the Year awards on CNN, an angry Trump ordered all dictionaries removed from federal offices. "They're fake words in fake dictionaries," he announced at a recent Florida rally to raise funds for Judge Roy Moore's recount. Trump said the dictionaries will be replaced with the FoxNewspeak Dictionary (1984; 2nd revisionist ed. 2017, Bannon, Spencer, and Moore).
Aides, reluctant to tell the president that no such dictionary exists because, well, they know how he gets, slapped a fake dust jacket on a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary borrowed from the Library of Congress. After they redacted Johnson's definition of trumpery, ‘salaciously splendid; something of less value than it seems; falsehood; empty talk’ and excised dotard, ‘a man whose age has impaired his intellects,’ they slipped the book onto a table in the Oval Office. “He doesn’t read anyway,” an aide said in an email, “so we figured this would calm him until Fox and Friends came on.”
Constitutional scholars were divided on whether the president has the authority to ban words. John Adams’ 1798 Sedition Act criminalized vocabulary critical of the president, but while James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both wrote memos arguing that the law violated the First Amendment, the Sedition Act expired before a court challenge could be mounted.
Courts found no First Amendment problems with Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 Sedition Act, which also censored anti-government words. Hundreds of people received stiff fines and sentences under Wilson’s law. In United States v. Abrams, for example, Judge Henry Clayton sentenced the authors of a Yiddish antiwar pamphlet to twenty years in prison. After the trial, Clayton, who represented Alabama in the U.S. House of Representatives before becoming a federal judge, insisted the fact that the defendants and their attorney were all Jews had nothing to do with the guilty verdict or the severity of the sentence. The Supreme Court upheld the convictions in the Abrams case over dissents from Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis.
It’s not clear whether the 1918 Sedition Act could survive a constitutional test today. But experts do agree that never before has the federal government sought to completely cut out huge swaths of the English language. That move is considered particularly worrisome since Congress is currently considering a bill to make English the official language of the United States (the English Language Unity Act, H.R. 997). “How can you make English official and then black out all its words?” a lobbyist for the powerful dictionary industry lamented.
In the meantime, lexicographers have reacted to the Word of the Year ban with dismay. The Web of Language blog, which has been naming a word of the year since 1994, was poised to name hate as its 2017 Word of the Year. Instead, its editor issued this terse statement: “We have literally no words.”
Although sources close to the president say his ban on Words of the Year does not include the Newspeak Dictionary, which is set to announce Trump™ as its 2107 Best Word of All Time, it remains to be seen whether the English language will be allocated any additional words in the 2018 federal budget. In the meantime, the activist group EnglishIndivisble is planning to challenge to Trump’s word ban in federal court, and both New York and California announced they would declare their own Words of the Year. One state did show clear support for Trump’s actions. The Tennessee legislature, which banned the teaching of evolution a century ago, hastily passed a law banning linguistic evolution and forbidding the use of state funds for any Word of the Year.
