2021 RELEASED A GLUT OF NEW VOCABULARY

The assertion that English is a dynamic language, which is constantly changing, may be an understatement when applied to the lexical evolution experienced during the past few years. No surprise that many of us emerged entirely bewildered, lost in a new linguistic jungle we did not know existed. What was genuinely unprecedented this past year was the hyperspeed at which the English speaking world amassed a new collective vocabulary relating to the Coronavirus, the social justice movement and elements of political and cultural militancy, and how quickly it became a core part of the language. In the words of Oxford Dictionaries President Casper Grathwohl: "I've never witnessed a year in language like the one we just had." According to the "Global Language Monitor," which collectively documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language usage worldwide, around 5,400 new words are created each year. About 1,000 of these end up in written form. From these we have been used to identify what words or expressions are recognized as "words of the year." This tradition began in Germany in 1971, and was picked up by the "American Dialect Society" in 1990. Their selection uses any of various assessments as to the most important word(s) or expression(s) in the public sphere during a specific year. This year the group chose "insurrection" as its word of the year. This followed "Covid" in 2020, "Fake News" - disinformation of falsehoods presented as real news; "Gaslight" - psychologically manipulating a person into questioning their own sanity; and "They" - a gender neutral singular pronoun for a person as a non-binary identifier, in some previous years. Oxford University selected "Vax" for 2021, after choosing "Post Truth" a few years ago. Cambridge entered the fray with "Quarantine" and "Perseverance." Merriam Webster used "Pandemic" and "Malarkey" in 2020, and ended up with "Vaccine" for last year. And so it goes. Most established institutions tend to select expressions that are already commonly used, generally uncontroversial, and not designed to evoke anything other than recognition within general parlance. Finalists that might have been considered include: "Lock-down," "Asymptomatic," "P.P.E.," "Essential Workers," "Superspreaders," "Staycation," and others, none of which would have raised an eyebrow. However, we also experienced a vocabulary expansion, introduced by those pushing for cultural changes in our society, that was designed to change the ways we identify people and describe situations. Their word choices are expressly designed to affect how we think about these. The idea is essentially that you can't change what you can't name, evolving into a language which identifies symbolic progress on the liberal end of the political spectrum, placating people, but inviting a backlash from those who want to maintain the status quo. Examples are plentiful. Some have already become politically incendiary. Most of us are familiar with expressions like: "Systemic Racism," "Critical Race Theory," "Cancel Culture," "Black Lives Matter," and "Woke Speak" - a term used by conservatives to identify some of the language coming out of left-leaning think-tanks. But, whether we agree with their usage or not, we can't escape their presence and every-day usage by a significant subset of our population. Consider: "Implicit Bias: - the subconscious associations that cause people to harbor stereotypes; "Non-Binary" - an umbrella term for gender identities that are neither male nor female - leading to a new set of gender pronouns like He/Him or She/Her. We also introduced clarifying language for terms long embedded in our culture, like "enslaved people" instead of "slaves;" "birthing parent" instead of "mother," and "unhoused" instead of homeless. In addition, we were confronted by a never ending series of acronyms. No sooner became "LGBTQ," - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer- a fairly common expression, the acronym expanded to "LGBTQIA2S+," adding "intersex," "asexual," "two spirit," and a "+" to indicate that the term should not be considered comprehensive. For those of us whose minds stop absorbing after five or six initials, we might be more comfortable absorbing "BIPOC"-Black, Indigenous, or other people of color, or "LATINX"-adults of Latin American descent, inclusive of people who identify as neither male or female. While some of these vocabulary expansions only resonate with a relatively small group of true believers, changing the way in which we describe cultural identifiers can accomplish practical changes. To erase references to our history of slavery, Rhode Island chose to remove "and Providence Plantations" from the state's original name; Twitter and Apple stopped using the terms "master," "slave," "blacklist," and "white list" from their programming codes; "Lady Antebellum" changed its name to "Lady A;" and the "Dixie Chicks" dropped "Dixie" from their name. Comprehension improves when you know what the words mean. A robust and dynamic vocabulary should help clarify and facilitate this process. But the infusion of too many value-laden expressions in a single years might amount to information overload. Nevertheless, our politicians will probably continue to fastidiously select, articulate, weaponize and gaslight their cherry-picked concepts for their own purposes, while some of us continue to wonder what happened to simply identifying everybody's word of the year. Theo Wierdsma