Dictionary does justice to word of the year
Merriam-Webster has chosen “justice” as its 2018 word of the year, driven by the churning news cycle over months and months.
The word follows “toxic,” picked by Oxford Dictionaries, and “misinformation,” from Dictonary.com.
Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, said “justice” consistently bubbled into the top 20 or 30 searches on the company’s website.
While it’s one of those common words people know how to spell and use correctly in a sentence, Sokolowski pointed to other reasons that drive search traffic.
Among them is an attempt to focus a train of thought around a philosophical problem, or to seek aspirational motivation.
Such well-known words are often among the most looked-up every year, including those that are slightly abstract, including “love,” he said.
The designation for “justice” came soon after US President Trump’s one-time fixer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes that included arranging the payment of hush money to conceal his boss’ alleged sexual affairs. He told a judge he agreed time and again to cover up Trump’s “dirty deeds” out of “blind loyalty.”
It also came ahead of a Senate vote on the “First Step Act,” a criminal justice reform bill with broad bipartisan support.
Earlier in the year, Kim Kardashian West not once but twice paid a White House visit to Trump to discuss prison and sentencing reform.
Sentencing for drug crimes, treatment for opioid addiction, a loosening of cannabis laws, a Tesla probe, the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign will ensure searches for Justice remain high.
“These are stories that connect to the culture and to society across races, across classes,” Sokolowski said. “We get this word that filters in.”
That includes Twitter in a big way. Often, when Trump tweets about the Department of Justice, he uses simply “Justice.” On August 1, when he tweeted his wish for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to stop the Mueller investigation, searches spiked significantly.
Searches for “justice” throughout the year, when compared to 2017, were up 74 percent on the site that has more than 100 million page views a month and nearly half a million entries, Sokolowski said.
To be word of the year worthy, an entry has to show both a high volume of traffic and a significant year-on-year increase in searches — as opposed to, say, a word that merely buzzed or felt lofty, he said.
“We are not editorializing, we looked at our data and we were ourselves surprised by this word,” Sokolowski said.
“This is a word that people have been thinking about for this entire year.”
The word “justice” comes from Latin, unlike a lot of the more emotional words that rose in Old English. Old English did have “law,” “fair” and “right,” but never “justice,” in reference to a system of laws.
“It’s not a coincidence that it comes from the 12th century, which immediately follows the Norman conquest,” he said.
Other words that experienced lookup spikes this year are: “maverick” (US Senator John McCain died); “respect” (Aretha Franklin died); “excelsior” (Stan Lee’s signature battle cry. He died); “pissant” (A radio host described Tom Brady’s daughter that way); “pansexual” (Janelle Monae described herself that way); “laurel” (Remember laurel vs. yanny?); “feckless” (What Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump, combined with a pejorative that begins with “c”); “epiphany” (The title of a BTS K-pop song that dropped this year); “lodestar” (used in reference to McCain in the New York Times op-ed identified as coming from inside the Trump administration); and “nationalism” (At an October 22 rally in Texas, Trump declared himself a nationalist).
