From gaslighting to permacrisis, what Word of the Year picks say about 2022, and the one that offers a ray of hope
- Permacrisis, the Collins English Dictionary word of the year, sums up the instability and catastrophe of recent years
- Merriam-Webster’s pick, gaslighting, is a logical follow-on from WOTYs such as post-truth and fake news. Australian dictionary editors struck a positive note
As the last for 2022, this column, as is tradition, surveys the Word of the Year (WOTY), as announced by dictionaries and other language-related bodies.
Being words or phrases judged by analysis, committee or poll to have been one of the most highly searched, prominent, or notable for that year, WOTY candidates and winners provide a good snapshot of the concerns of the world – and several of this year’s picks make for depressing, though unsurprising, reading.
Given that recent years’ WOTYs include Brexit (Collins English Dictionary, 2016), climate emergency (Oxford Languages, 2019), pandemic (Merriam-Webster, 2020), lockdown (Collins, 2020), doomscrolling (Macquarie Dictionary, 2020) and insurrection (American Dialect Society, 2021), it is perhaps inevitable that we would find ourselves in a “permacrisis” – Collins’ pick for 2022.
This word captures our experience of the past few years of an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.
Contributing to such a permacrisis is our existence in an age of misinformation: already in 2016, “post-truth” was Oxford Dictionaries’ WOTY while “fake news” was Macquarie’s 2016 WOTY and the 2017 WOTY of both Collins and the American Dialect Society.
This year, the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage, was explicitly recognised, in the selection of the term “gaslighting” as Merriam-Webster’s 2022 WOTY.
Gaslighting – derived from the verb to gaslight – is the action or process of manipulating a person by psychological means, usually over an extended period, into questioning their own sanity.
The earliest written appearances were in a 1961 psychological journal. Its origin is more creative, however, coming from the title of the 1944 film Gaslight (based on a play first performed in 1938), in which a man psychologically manipulates his wife into believing that she is going insane, by causing the house’s gas lights to dim, but insisting to his wife that they are not, and that she can’t trust her own perceptions.
A glimmer of hope is found in Macquarie Dictionary’s and Australian National Dictionary Centre’s 2022 choice, “teal”. The word – meaning a shade of dark greenish blue – derives from the name of a small freshwater fowl, the smallest of the ducks, with patches of teal on its head and wings.
The colour was used in certain candidates’ electoral material in Australia’s federal elections, and has come to refer to political candidates holding generally ideologically moderate views but supporting strong action regarding environmental and climate action policies and the prioritising of integrity in politics.
