The American Dialect Society’s word of the year is “dumpster fire”
Every year, members of the American Dialect Society gather together to pick the best word that snuck into our lexicons the year before. In 2014, the ADS crowned the hashtag “#blacklivesmatter” over the softer cultural references ”bae” and “manspreading.” In 2015, they reflected the media’s move toward gender-neutral pronouns by picking “they” over “on fleek” and the verb “ghost.”
And in 2016, they have not so much chosen a word as they have substantiated the state of America that predominates a hefty portion of the nation’s mindset.
The 2016 word of the year is “dumpster fire.”
A metaphor that has been used by Mother Jones, The Weekly Standard, and seemingly half of Twitter during the presidential debates, it describes an unwieldy situation that has gotten out of control due to mismanagement. Often used in reference to the 2016 US election, the original GIF has been viewed over 10 million times. It became such a popular term that the AP Style Guide, a literary bible for writers and editors, changed their official syntax for “dumpster” to accommodate:
“As 2016 unfolded, many people latched on to dumpster fire as a colorful, evocative expression to verbalize their feelings that the year was shaping up to be a catastrophic one,” says Ben Zimmer, chair of the society’s new words committee. “In pessimistic times, ‘dumpster fire’ served as a darkly humorous summation of how many viewed the year’s events.”
The ADS’s annual word-of-the-year compilation is the oldest of its type, and the final results are voted on by a cohort of linguists, grammarians, lexicographers, researchers, writers, and other wordy types. The words are chosen to reflect the most important and poignant issues in American society, and have to be “newly prominent or notable in the past year.”
“Dumpster fire” is certainly not a new term. Starting its neologism life as an idiom used in sports reporting, the first time the Columbia Journalism Review could find it being used in political parlance was in 2008, on the Scholars and Rogues blog: “Maybe, satire aside, this whole dumpster fire is bad for progressives fighting their way toward November.” Since then, it has gobbled up oxygen and grown into an inferno, swallowing much of 2016’s political rhetoric with it.
“Dumpster fire” beat out other politically tinged terms such as “post-truth,” “deplorables (basket of),” “alt-right,” and “cuck,” as well as teen-speak such as “woke,” “slay,” and “turn up.” Here is a list of the nominations for all categories, including the winners for each and the ADS-provided definitions.
Word of the year:
normalize: render normal that which was previously deemed beyond acceptable bounds
Political word of the year:
deplorables (basket of): epithet used by Clinton in speech about Trump supporters
Digital word of the year:
fam: one’s crew, squad, circle of friends, etc.
Slang word of the year:
fire: (adj.) cool, fun, stylish
Most useful/likely to succeed:
chip: (verb) insert a bank card into an electronic chip reader (as opposed to swipe)
Most creative:
-exit: combining form relating to departure, after Brexit (Calexit, Texit, Brangelexit)
Euphemism of the year:
alt-right: umbrella term for extremist racial ideologies including white nationalism and white supremacy
WTF word of the year:
cuck, cuckservative: derisive term for mainstream Republicans by alt-right
Hashtag of the year
#blackgirlmagic: celebration of black women and their achievements
Emoji of the year:
🙌: raising hands (celebration, praise)