"Word of the Year" Tom Denton Letter to the Editor

WORD OF THE YEAR

The American Dialect Society annually gives an award for the “Word of the Year.” In 2016 members chose “dumpster fire, ” a term familiar in political rhetoric. I propose a likely leading contender for the 2017 award: “’craven’: completely lacking in courage, cowardly, as in ‘a craven abdication of his moral duty’” (Oxford Dictionaries online). It is a harsh sounding word that calls to mind the raven, which picks at dead things and suggests a journey with no turning back . . . nevermore.


In the current American landscape some pretend that tweets are a vehicle for policy making In the current American landscape some pretend that tweets are a vehicle for policy making. They praise a President who makes a “presidential “ speech when “I feel like it. “ Republican politicians who called candidate Trump a “cancer” or who refused to endorse him now serve in his administration. GOP officials who would have screamed “treason! “ if aides of the Democratic candidate had been consulting with Russian officials now scoff at calls for an independent investigation. A chilling revelation is dawning on the American public. It is not new, but the chaos of the past year has illuminated it in a way that should haunt us all. The principles of many of our public officials are servants to the temptations of power. Power, we now see, is the end; profiles in courage are quietly filed away as the victors celebrate. Do words matter? Are any principles inviolate? Can we trust that what we believe to be our essential rights will not fall to the stampede of winning? What if you are on the wrong side next time? There’s a word that, in the end, might brand us all, a word that might also be a contender in 2017: “loser.”


PJ 3/7.