20 December 2020
As in past years, I’ve come up with a list of words of the year. I do things a bit differently than other such lists in that I don’t try to select one term to represent the entire year. Instead, I select twelve terms, one for each month. During the year as each month passed, I selected one word that was prominent in public discourse or that was representative of major events of that month. Other such lists that are compiled at year’s end often exhibit a bias toward words that are in vogue in November or December, and my hope is that a monthly list will highlight words that were significant earlier in the year and give a more comprehensive overview of the planet’s entire circuit around the sun. I also don’t publish the list until the late in December; selections of words of the year that are made in November (or even earlier!), as some of them are, make no sense to me. You cannot legitimately select a word to represent a year when you’ve still got over a month left to go.
My list is skewed by an American perspective, but since I’m American, them’s the breaks. Others would have a different list, and that’s perfectly legitimate. This year, of course, the list is dominated by pandemic-related terms. While I made an effort to look for terms that are not pandemic related, there’s no getting around the fact that our lives in 2020 were dominated by coronavirus.
I interpret word loosely to mean a lexical item, including phrases, abbreviations, hashtags, and the like. The selected words are not necessarily, or even usually, new, but they are associated with their respective month, either coming to widespread attention or relating to some event that happened during it. Of course, the selection and perspective are entirely mine and not indicative of any deeper truth. None of the word-of-year efforts should be confused with science or academic rigor.
So, here are the 2020 Wordorigins.org Words of the Year:
January: #WorldWarIII. Given how bad 2020 became, it’s hard to remember that the year started out with the specter of imminent war between the United States and Iran. The hashtag #WorldWarIII was trending on Twitter as the year opened. Fortunately, like murder hornets would later in the year, the threat did not come to fruition, but like murder hornets, the danger continues to simmer on a backburner. And just when the threat of nuclear annihilation faded, the year’s real danger emerged.
February: Covid-19/Coronavirus. This one needs no explanation.
March: doomscrolling. The practice of scrolling through one’s social media feeds with a sense of impending dread at what disastrous news item one might come across exploded onto the scene.
April: zoombombing. With students engaged in distance learning and workers telecommuting, use of the Zoom videoconferencing tool skyrocketed. But by April, reports of security flaws that led to the practice of zoombombing had come to fore. Most often practiced by teenaged pranksters, but sometimes by adults with darker motives, zoombombing is the interruption of a Zoom videoconference with racist, pornographic, or otherwise unwanted and inappropriate images and messages. But as the year progressed, Zoom upgraded its security and users became more aware of and proficient at ways to prevent such attacks, and the problem diminished in severity.
May: I can’t breathe. In May, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. His last words, as a police officer knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, were “I can’t breathe.” Floyd was not the first to utter these words while being choked by police; they go back to the last words of Eric Garner, murdered in 2014 by the New York Police Department. Floyd’s last words became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and sparked protests across the United States, among a populace that not only had belatedly come to realize that police murdering Black men and women was a major problem but had also found in his words a metaphor for living and dying with Covid-19.
June: TERF. A TERF is a trans-exclusionary, radical feminist, that is feminist who does not consider trans women to be women. The term came to the fore in June when author J.K. Rowling, of the Harry Potter series, penned an essay arguing against rights for trans people, especially trans women. This was not Rowling’s first foray into the issue, but it was the most detailed and deliberate of her attacks on trans women.
July: QAnon. The cluster of right-wing conspiracy theories known as QAnon has been around since 2016, but it only gained widespread media attention this July. The name comes from an anonymous person (or persons) claiming to have a Q clearance whose posts to various internet sites are the source of many of the theories. A Q clearance is U.S. Department of Energy nomenclature for a Top-Secret security clearance. (The Department of Energy manages the U.S. nuclear weapons program, hence the need for many high-level clearances among its staff.) The ideas promulgated by QAnon are legion, but many focus on the belief that a cabal of pedophiles in the government and Democratic party are orchestrating opposition to Donald Trump.
August: superspreader event. A superspreader event is a gathering that results in an “unusually high” number of infections of a disease, in this case Covid-19. In August 2020, the Sturgis Bike Rally, an annual event in South Dakota, was such an event. The event gained notoriety when one study estimated that the rally resulted in over 250,000 cases, a number that most experts consider to be a wild overestimate and that the actual number is measured in the hundreds—bad, but not insanely so.
September: TikTok. TikTok is a Chinese-owned, social-media app that allows users to post short (3–60 second) videos. Launched in China in 2016, it became widely available worldwide in mid-2018 and has steadily increased in popularity since. In August, U.S. President Trump signed an executive order that would ban the app in the United States unless ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns it, sold its controlling interest. He also signed a similar order against WeChat, a messaging and payment app owned by a different Chinese company. In September, ByteDance went to court to prevent the implementation of Trump’s executive order. To date, the matter is still playing out in the courts, but it seems likely that ByteDance will win the case or the incoming Biden administration will drop the matter before that happens.
October: originalism. In late September, President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill seat of the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the U.S. Supreme Court. Barrett’s confirmation process was a rushed affair to get Barrett on the bench before the election in November. And during that process, the doctrine of originalism came to the fore, a doctrine that Barrett supposedly uses to guide her decisions. Originalism is the belief that in interpreting the law, what the judge believes the meaning of the text to be as of the time it was drafted should take precedence over other considerations, including intervening court decisions to the contrary. The problems with originalism include that it places ultimate authority on the interpretive whims of a single judge, introducing instability, unpredictability, and inconsistencies in the law, as well as the irony of directly contravening the original intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who specifically stated that the constitution and laws had to be reinterpreted with each succeeding generation and not governed by a “dead hand.”
November: nail-biter. The 2020 U.S. presidential election was thought by many to likely be a nail-biter, a very close election. While the election eventually turned out otherwise, for a few weeks in early November, there was much anxiety and fretting over the outcome as people waited for the votes to be counted.
December: vaccine. The first vaccines for COVID-19 began to be administered around the world. While it will take months for the vaccines to reach everyone, people have begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Words that I seriously considered but didn’t make the cut, although they clearly deserved to, include:
social distancing
flatten the curve
defund the police
murder hornets
binge watching / Tiger King
second wave
