Illustration by Tom Bachtell

If language, as Emerson said, is fossil poetry, then “youthquake” seems like a plastic bone. “Youthquake” is the verbal concoction recently declared Word of the Year (the year being 2017) by the experts at Oxford Dictionaries. They define it as “significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people.”

The actions and the influence of young people not being unusually notable or effectual during the past year, you might wonder whether the Oxonians are confusing 2017 with 1967. Actually, “youthquake” dates from 1965, when it was coined by the fashion industry. But Oxford says that the incidence of “youthquake” spiked around the time of the British elections last June, when the Conservative Party did worse than expected and a surge of votes for Labour was attributed to high turnout among younger voters.

Given that Labour did not win a majority, and Brexit remains in progress under the auspices of a Conservative Prime Minister, it’s a little hard to know what the quake part was. “Youthquake” has also been criticized, in Britain, as the kind of word that someone sitting at a desk, such as a headline writer, might come up with, a word that no one would use in speech. People prefer to have their neologisms boil up unbidden from the global electronic soup—like, for instance, “milkshake duck,” one of the runners-up to “youthquake.” (You can Google that one. And is it a word, or is it a meme?) Nevertheless, we are assured that “youthquake” is “a word on the move.”

Other usage professionals have chosen their own Words of the Year, 2017 edition, and the honorees have a similarly wonky character: “populism” (Cambridge Dictionary), “feminism” (Merriam-Webster’s), and “complicit” (Dictionary.com). According to Merriam-Webster’s, “feminism” was the most searched-for word in its online dictionary, up seventy per cent from 2016. But who in 2017 needed to be told what “feminism” means? Upon searching, these people would have learned from Merriam-Webster’s that the definition of “feminism” is “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” Some number of them were probably relieved to learn that it is still just a theory.

On the whole, 2017 was not a great year for the English language. Reality is running ahead of our vocabulary. For one thing, no good terms have emerged to describe the current state of political affairs. What is the ideology of this Administration? It is not social conservatism or neoliberalism, and it is certainly not populism (though it may be faux populism). “Nationalism” seems to be the default term, but that does not capture the freebooting and bullying behavior of everyday political life. Normal terms do not apply. We are living in a down-is-up, war-is-peace world.

It may be that, in the language of politics, a few words are ready to be cycled out. Some of these are words that ended up on the losing side. It is a good bet that Americans will not be hearing “diversity” or “together” much in the next Presidential election.

In the lexicon of commentary, some terms have suffered serious semantic erosion and could be dropped. “Normalization” once meant making the deviant conform to the ordinary, but it now means the opposite, accepting the deviant as the new ordinary. “Pivot” used to mean “turning one’s attention to,” as in “Obama’s pivot to China.” It now means something more like “faking it for political effect”—as in “My God, Trump is not pivoting!” (It turned out he didn’t because he couldn’t.) It would be nice to see if we can live without “double down,” which now seems to mean “refuse to acknowledge the obvious.” And “breaking news”: isn’t that a redundancy?

Arguably, the Word of the Year is not a word at all. It’s an alphanumeric character, #. The President speaks in hashtag, but so do the President’s opponents, and so does, for example, the #MeToo movement. Like most major shifts in communicative modes, # democratizes, while freaking out traditionalists, who worry, not wrongly, about the loss of ambiguity and complexity. But, look, something is being said, and it’s being read.

With all the damage that’s being done to the social fabric, in matters ranging from race relations to income inequality, to name just two areas where the national leadership seems not only determined to make things worse but weirdly excited about it, fretting over the state of the language seems like an indulgence. Fossil poetry or not, words are tools, and what matters is the job that they are being made to do. Still, language is a commons. It’s a resource that we share, and the resource is impoverished when words are redefined, weaponized, or otherwise co-opted and bent out of shape.

A good candidate for Word of the Year in this category is “fake.” “Fake” once meant “counterfeit” or “inauthentic,” like a fake Picasso or a fake birth certificate. It is now used to mean “I deny your reality.” “Hoax” is used with the same intention. (“Alternative facts,” another phrase associated with reality denial, seems to have been mocked out of existence.)

Many Americans were shocked to hear their beliefs characterized as “fake science” or “fake news.” Those Americans thought that they understood what counts as evidence, what counts as reason, what counts as an argument. Suddenly, the rules changed. In national politics, you no longer need evidence or reason. You no longer need to make an argument. You need only to assert. If your assertion is questioned, you need only to repeat it.

“Fake” and “hoax” are the “abracadabra”s of the Trump world, words recited to make inconvenient facts disappear. In most of life after nursery school, “abracadabra” doesn’t work, because it stops fooling other people. For grownups, as a rule, saying something doesn’t make it so. This is not true of Presidents, however, grownup or not. Presidents are legally empowered to make what comes out of their mouths a reality for other people. This President has realized that he can say literally anything and someone will pop up to explain it, or explain it away.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean,” Humpty Dumpty says to Alice. How can you make a word mean so many different things? Alice asks. “The question,” Humpty Dumpty replies, “is which is to be master, that’s all.” George Orwell said the same thing. Meaning, at bottom, is about power. “Truth,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once said, is “the majority vote of that nation that could lick all others.” A disagreeable thought, but not an inapposite one in 2017.

Later on, of course, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. Something to look forward to in 2018. Happy New Year. ♦