Somewhere around this time every year, various publications (usually dictionaries) announce their “word of the year.” I always, or at least usually, find their choices interesting and sometimes a little befuddling. I guess it shows my age, but sometimes i”ve never even heard of the “word of the year,” and sometimes lately, it’s not even a “word.” Just a few years ago the word of the year was an emoji — that’s more of a picture than a word to me.
Anyhow, one of the most popular/famous word of the year choosers is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED.) This year the OED word of the war is “vax.” And yes, if you type it, your computer will try to change it to “tax.”
If you remember, last year the Oxford English Dictionary didn’t come up with a word of the year — they decided there were too many new words associated with the COVID pandemic to choose a single word. Merriam-Webster did choose the word “pandemic” for their word of the year, however.
While last year “pandemic” and “lockdown” were often used words, this year OED chose vax because it highlights the medical breakthroughs and the rise of Covid vaccines across the world. According to the Oxford dictionary, the word vax has generated a number of derivatives that we now see in a wide range of informal contexts, from vax sites and vax cards to getting vaxxed and being fully vaxxed. The dictionary authors believe that no word better captures the atmosphere of the bast year than vax.
Usually, I just assume that the Oxford word of the year is good enough for me. But this year, the Cambridge Dictionary’s choice was interesting to me….
Their word of the year was looked up more than 243,000 times on their website in 2021. Their word choice is “perseverance.” Perseverance isn’t a particularly common word for most people’s vocabulary. The look-ups for the word spiked in February after NASA’s Perseverance Rover made its final descent to land on Mars. However, in the following months, perseverance continued to be looked up more frequently than before. It apparently takes perseverance to land a rover on Mars, and also to face the challenges and disruption to our lives from COVID-19, climate disasters, political instability and conflict. In some ways this is a more interesting and appropriate choice for word of the year than vax.
But back to vax — I guess it comes from the word vaccine that was first recorded to be used in the English language in the year 1799 and its derivative words like vaccination and vaccinate came into use in the year 1800. Vaccine is derived from the Latin word Vacca, which means cow. Another popular synonym for vax is jab, which was also a very popular term used this year.
I can’t argue that vax is an appropriate word, but thinking about it, maybe I’d pick perseverance…. it certainly does take perseverance to face the challenges and disruption to our lives this year — and — it’s a good name for a Mars rover…..
— 30 —