‘Justice’ is Webster’s word of the year

Source: Times of India dated 18.12.18

Racial justice. Obstruction of justice. Social justice. The Justice Department. 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”, plucked by Dictonary.com.

Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, said on Monday that “justice” consistently bubbled into the top 20 or 30 lookups on the company’s website, spiking at times due to specific events but also skating close to the surface for much of the year.

While it’s a common word people likely know how to spell and use correctly, 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 motivation.

The designation for “justice” came soon after President Trump’s ex-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 to cover up Trump’s “dirty deeds” out of “blind loyalty”.

Earlier in the year, Kim Kardashian visited the White House twice to discuss prison and sentencing reform with Trump. Sentencing for drug crimes, a loosening of cannabis laws, a Tesla probe, the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign: Justice will remain top of mind into the new year.

Often, when Trump tweets about the department of justice, he uses simply “Justice”. On August 1, when he tweeted his wish for then-AG Jeff Sessions to stop the Mueller probe, searches spiked significantly. Searches for “justice” throughout the year, when compared to 2017, were up 74% on the site , Sokolowski said.

Misinformation is Dictionary.com’s word of the year

Source: Times of India dated 27.11.2018

Misinformation, as opposed to disinformation, was chosen on Monday as Dictionary.com’s word of the year on the tattered coattails of “toxic,” picked earlier this month for the same honour by Oxford Dictionaries in these tumultuous times.
Jane Solomon, a linguist-in-residence at Dictionary, said in a recent interview that her site’s choice of “mis” over “dis” was deliberate, intended to serve as a “call to action” to be vigilant in the battle against fake news, flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, among other conduits. It’s the idea of intent, whether to inadvertently mislead or to do it on purpose, that the Oakland, California-based company wanted to highlight. The company decided it would go high when others have spent much of 2018 going low. AP

‘Misinformation’ ruled this year: Dictionary.com

Source: DNA dt. 27.11.2018

Misinformation, as opposed to disinformation, was chosen on Monday as Dictionary.com’s word of the year on the tattered coattails of “toxic,” picked earlier this month for the same honour by Oxford Dictionaries in these tumultuous times.

Jane Solomon, a linguist-in-residence at Dictionary, said in a recent interview that her site’s choice of “mis” over “dis” was deliberate, intended to serve as a “call to action” to be vigilant in the battle against fake news, flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers, among other conduits.

It’s the idea of intent, whether to inadvertently mislead or to do it on purpose, that the Oakland, California-based company wanted to highlight. The company decided it would go high when others have spent much of 2018 going low.

“The rampant spread of misinformation is really providing new challenges for navigating life in 2018,” Solomon told The Associated Press ahead of the word of the year announcement. “Misinformation has been around for a long time, but over the last decade or so the rise of social media has really, really changed how information is shared. We believe that understanding the concept of misinformation is vital to identifying misinformation as we encounter it in the wild, and that could ultimately help curb its impact.”

In studying lookups on the site that trended this year, Dictionary noticed “our relationship with the truth is something that came up again and again,” she said.

For example, the word “mainstream” popped up a lot, spiking in January as the term “mainstream media,” or MSM, grew to gargantuan proportions, wielded as an insult by some on the political right. Other words swirling around the same problem included a lookup surge in February for “white lie” after Hope Hicks, then White House communications director, admitted to telling a few for President Donald Trump.

The word “Orwellian” surfaced in heavy lookups in May, after a statement attributed to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused the Chinese government of “Orwellian nonsense” in trying to impose its views on American citizens and private companies when it declared that United Airlines, American Airlines and other foreign carriers should refer to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as part of China in public-facing materials, such as their websites.

Misinformation, Solomon said, “frames what we’ve all been through in the last 12 months.” In that vein, the site with 90 million monthly users has busied itself adding new word entries for “filter bubble,” ‘’fake news,” ‘’post-fact,” ‘’post-truth” and “homophily,” among others. Other word entries on the site have been freshened to reflect timely new meanings, including “echo chamber.”

The company’s runners-up for the top honour include “representation” driven by the popularity of the movies “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” along with wins during the US midterm elections for Muslim women, Native Americans and LGBTQ candidates.

But the rise of misinformation, Solomon said, stretches well beyond US borders and Facebook’s role in disseminating fake news and propaganda in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. —AP