|
|
|
December 31:
|
GUILTY
We are waaaay beyond complicit. At this point, we are GUILTY, our Word of the Year for 2018.
The GOP is guilty of enabling an unindicted co-conspirator in the White House to wreak havoc on our system of democracy and our venerated institutions. (Evidently the GOP's professed "Family Values" are for a Crime Family!) Individual 1’s closest advisors are guilty of conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, bank fraud conspiracy, making false statements to Congress and the FBI, failure to file reports of foreign bank accounts, assisting in preparation of false tax documents, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, identity theft, witness tampering, obstruction of justice – and more. (These are “the best people” with whom Trump always surrounds himself.) His family is guilty of bilking and bamboozling taxpayers to finance their indulgences. (They don't care. Do U?) His circle of "sicko-phants" is guilty of allowing him to trash American values, and his clan of supporters is guilty of empowering White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis and racists to parade around the country to bask in his glow. (The GOP's "Thousand Points of Light" now glow with Tiki-torches.) Fox News is guilty of reporting fake stories and false narratives to whitewash his offenses (all while the man at the top is guilty of duplicity, deceit, and deception). We are no longer complicit, last year’s “Word of the Year” at Dictionary.com. We are guilty. Below: George Papadopolous, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Richard Pinedo, Alexander Van Der Zwan, and Russian spy Maria Butina.
Below: The walls are closing in on the unindicted co-conspirator in the White House. Interestingly enough, Trump states that he looks like Elvis Presley. Maybe soon he'll be singing "Jailhouse Rock"? 
Below: More evidence of the guilt-ridden year that was 2018: Bill Cosby; Neo-Nazi Trump supporter who killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, VA; 300 Catholic priests in the state of Pennsylvania; Larry Nassar, former team doctor for the USA Gymnastics national team.
|
|
December 30:
|
ENOUGH!
Honorable Mention: #BASTA Michael Avenatti, the attorney who represents Stormy Daniels in the case against Donald Trump for campaign felonies when he paid hush money to the porn star through a "fixer," often taunts Trump through tweets when he catches Trump in lie after lie after lie. In most cases, Avenatti closes his tweets with #Basta -- the Italian word for "Enough!" Honorable Mention: MARCH FOR OUR LIVES Since the Columbine massacre, there have been over 200 school shootings with more than 300 children murdered and close to 500 injured. Children across the nation practice active shooter drills annually (see our entry below dated "December 7"). Students have had enough -- and the March for Our Lives was a student-led demonstration in March 2018 in support of stronger gun violence prevention measures after the school massacre in Parkland, Florida. Honorable Mention: NEVER AGAIN Never again? Mass shootings in America? Like those in the GOP & NRA say, "Never say never." They have plenty of "thoughts and prayers" to go around. Honorable Mention: STAY IN YOUR LANE
|
|
December 29:
|
BLUE WAVE
Honorable Mention: TRIBALISM In popular culture, tribalism may refers to a way of thinking and behaving in which people are loyal to their social group above all else. From an article in The New Yorker (HERE): "We live in a time of tribes. Not of ideologies, parties, groups, or beliefs—these don’t convey the same impregnability of political fortifications, or the yawning chasms between them. American politics today requires a word as primal as “tribe” to get at the blind allegiances and huge passions of partisan affiliation. Tribes demand loyalty, and in return they confer the security of belonging. They’re badges of identity, not of thought. In a way, they make thinking unnecessary, because they do it for you, and may punish you if you try to do it for yourself. To get along without a tribe makes you a fool. To give an inch to the other tribe makes you a sucker." 
|
|
December 28:
|
TRUTH
RIP the Truth. There is no Truth anymore from Trump, the GOP and state-run Fox news. There are alternative facts and an ever-shifting fabrication of what they present as "the truth."
Honorable Mentiion: CULT 45 Very weak-minded and/or poorly educated people often look to persuasive flim-flam artists who can solve all of their problems for them. They admire someone who "knows more than the generals" or states unequivocally, "I alone can solve your problems." Trump knows this. He even stated during the campaign that he could murder someone in broad daylight, and his followers would still support him -- without question. Therefore, on a take on the malt liquor Colt 45, Trump's sheep are often referred to as Cult 45, the blind followers of the 45th president who are willing to accept any "truth" from Trump -- even as it mutates. Company name/ tagline developer and all-around word-smith Nancy Friedman wrote about "Cult45" HERE. Honorable Mention: MUTUALLY AGREEABLE EXPLANATION When Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing and dismemberment of Virginia resident and Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, Trump refused to accept American intelligence that confirmed that fact. The blood money was more important than the truth -- so Trump and the Saudi government traded communications of support as they searched for a "mutually agreeable explanation." Like we said above, RIP the truth. Honoroable Mention: MARGINAL The one time -- yes, the one time Trump could have told a lie and gotten away with it was when he spoke to a seven-year-old boy on Christmas Eve. The boy was calling NORAD to check on Santa's location as he flew around the globe. "Are you still a believer in Santa?" asked Trump. "Because at 7, it's marginal, right?" Are you still a believer in the truth? With Trump at the helm, it's marginal -- at best. |
|
December 27:
|
TRE45ON
In addition to the many crimes committed by Trump -- past mob-related crimes, past and current tax crimes, fraud, obstruction of justice, campaign violations -- he's also committed treason. From showing his true colors during the campaign ("Russia, if you're listening...") to "knowing nothing" about any Russian meeting -- and then concocting lies about discussions about Russian orphans -- to his submission to Putin in Helsinki, Trump's perfidious actions have been shocking.
Our favorite rendition of the word TREASON evolved this year with the number 45 embedded in the spelling (as shown above). Below: In Freudian-slips this past fall and winter, Trump tweeted that perhaps even he realizes (and confesses?) his criminal transgression, and Fox News projected a subliminal message to the president's clan.
|
|
December 26:
|
SHITHOLE COUNTRIES
During a meeting with lawmakers over a potential immigration deal, Trump said, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
He was referring to people from Haiti and countries in Africa. He complained that the US, instead, should accept people from places such as Norway. After his remark was reported, GOP members “couldn’t recall” if Trump said it or not. Others said as a matter of fact that Trump said it. Lindsey Graham said, “I don’t think I heard what others thought he said, and I’m somewhat sure he didn’t say what some claim he stated , so I’m fairly certain that if anyone heard what they thought he said or was just thinking out loud, then I suspect he just said what someone wanted to hear. It's just that clear." Mhmm. He said it. 
|
|
December 25:
|
|
|
December 24:
|
UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR
|
|
December 23:
|
CARAVAN
Donald Trump is one master of deceit. He can spin an apocalyptic forecast more frightening than the coming of Y2K, killer bees, and 2011’s Rapture combined. His tales of terror feature Mexican rapists, drug overlords, and MS-13 gang members roaming the streets of small-town America. In 2018 he whipped up a frenzy with the coming of a caravan – until the mid-term election ended.
|
|
December 22:
|
ADULTS IN THE ROOM
* Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis announced that he is quitting the administration, and he submitted a scathing letter raising a host of disturbing questions (From CNBC: “ The most significant of them arise from Secretary Mattis' suggested differences with his Commander-in-Chief regarding the value of allies — and the dangers of strategic, authoritarian competitors.)
Many are alarmed by Mattis’ departure, though, stating that he is the last “adult in the room” – alluding to the anonymous op-ed published in The New York Times earlier this year: “It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room,” wrote the anonymous writer. The adults have left the building. All that's left are the criminals and liars. |
|
December 21:
|
CRISIS ACTORS
Trump, the GOP, and right-wing conspiracy theorists prey upon the poorly educated because they know they'll fall for anything. In order to masquerade the truth, the Conservative Right pushes all sorts of whacky rumors and reports because they know their followers are naive and gullible. They have concocted plenty of kooky tales in the past about protesters and victims being nothing more than paid crisis actors and role players engaged to portray victims -- and in 2018 they had their sheepish followers believing that survivors from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting were crisis actors.
Of course, the real crisis actors are Trump and the whack-jobs that surround and support him. They all lie through their teeth and spin tales in order to create fake crisis after crisis to instill fear in the public. Remember Pizzagate? The Caravan? Benghazi? (Non-GOP) Voter Fraud? The Seth Rich Conspiracy.? The Roy Moore Set-Up? Microwave Oven Surveillance? There are so many more! Trump knows that a fearful public is a dutiful and unquestioning public. 
|
|
December 20:
|
FLIP
There are more flippers in the Trump administration than in a pin ball machine factory.
Below, from left to right: Michael Flynn -- flipped. Paul Manafort -- flipped. Omarosa -- flipped. David Pecker -- flipped. George Papadopoulus. Michael Cohen -- flipped. And there are others too! 
Honorable Mention: TAPES
|
|
December 19:
|
IMPEACHMENT
|
|
December 18:
|
WOULDN'T
Within twenty-four hours, Trump's handlers had him walking back his statement: ""I thought that I made myself very clear, but having just reviewed the transcript...I realized that there is a need for some clarification," Trump said. "The sentence should have been...'I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia'."
|
|
December 17:
|
LODESTAR
|
|
December 16:
|
I HEAR YOU
Have you ever noticed that whatever Trump says, the opposite is true?
“I only surround myself with the best people.” Nope. Nothing could be further from the truth. “Believe me.” Whatever he just said is a lie. “No collusion.” Yep, there was collusion. “I’m a stable genius.” Laughable. “No one respects women more than I do.” Again, laughable. It has literally reached the point that Trump’s staffers have to write cue cards for him – though he rarely follows their direction to read from them. Case in point: When Trump met with survivors form the Parkland school massacre at Stoneman Douglass High School, a staffer literally had to write empathetic comments for him to croak, including “I hear you.”
|
|
December 15:
|
SPACE FORCE
Below: Trump on the White House lawn recruiting for his Space Force. Trump designed the Space Force uniform himself. "I based the uniform on some robes and hat I used to see my father in," confessed Trump.
|
|
December 14:
|
WITCH HUNT
|
|
December 13:
|
TENDER AGE SHELTERS
In the future, when historians list the top ten darkest moments or our country's history, surely eight to nine of the entries will come from the Trump administration -- and one of the darkest moments will be the use of "tender age shelters," i.e. prison camps for children, an idea dreamed up by Stephen Miller, one Trump's neo-Nazi advisors.
The "shelters" were used (and are still in use at this time) to detain and warehouse babies and other young children who have been forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border (or "boarder," as Trump would tweet).
|
|
December 12:
|
NATIONALIST
Trump's clan had reason to cheer last July when he announced that he was one of them -- a Nationalist. Of course, the dog whistles are gone these days, so they knew exactly what he meant.
Honorable Mention: SECOND CIVIL WAR Last July, another of Alex Jones' wacky conspiracy theories -- that a Second Civil War was imminent -- launched a bloody battle on social media, and the liberals definitely won as #SecondCivilWarLetters trended on Twitter (HERE). |
|
December 11:
|
INFEST
Donald Trump often characterizes immigrants as “animals” and “vermin,” but his use of the verb “infest” in connection to human beings was an alarming word choice for many with a knowledge of history.
From an article by Aviya Kushner: “Characterizing people as vermin has historically been a precursor to murder and genocide. The Nazis built on centuries-old hatred of Jews as carriers of disease in a film titled “Der Ewige Jude,” or “The Eternal Jew.” As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes on its website, in a section helpfully titled “Defining the Enemy:” “One of the film’s most notorious sequences compares Jews to rats that carry contagion, flood the continent, and devour precious resources.” To read Kushner's complete article, click HERE. 
Honorable Mention: MERIT BASED A merit-based immigration system is a point system where immigrants' eligibility to enter the country is determined by whether they are able to score above a threshold number in a scoring system that might include such factors as education level, wealth, connection with the country, language fluency, existing job offer, or others. Trump’s system would also include a very high score for white people and/or those from Finland (especially if they bring their own rakes).
|
|
December 10:
|
HOTHOUSE EARTH
Below left: Trump insists he has a "natural instinct" for science. Below right: The man can't even drink a glass or bottle of water.
|
|
December 9:
|
WOMP! WOMP!
|
|
December 8:
|
QAnon (and Names of the Year)
However, Gary Trump isn't the only one who fits the "Low IQ and Nonsense" descriptors. Nope. These attributes describe all of the #QAnon and Trump followers. The latest tripe these fools fell for was that top Democrats would be arrested en masse at the funeral of President Bush 41.
In a recent report by the Association for Psychological Science (APS), #QAnon followers were ranked as the organisms with the lowest IQs when compared to all other beings: 
OTHER NAMES OF THE YEAR (click each name for information):
|
|
December 7:
|
THOUGHTS & PRAYERS
Below on the left: Children hide in a bathroom during an elementary school's lockdown drill. I wonder what their thoughts and prayers are?
Below on the right: Kindergartners try on their new bullet-proof nap blankets. I wonder what their thoughts and prayers are?
If all of the children above were murdered in a school attack, what would the GOP's response be? Nothing more than "thoughts and prayers."
Nothing more than empty thoughts and hollow prayers. Remember how congress was finally going to do something about bump stocks after the mass murder in Las Vega last year? What's been done? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Following each and every massacre, the GOP and the NRA offer up their thoughts and prayers -- and then nothing else happens. Ever. Except the Gross Old Politicians continue to line their wallets with more and more cash from the NRA. NOTE: The word "bump stock" made our annual list of Words of the Year last year -- check it out HERE. Scroll down to the entry dated December 12. Honorable Mention: NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) NDAs are big in the world of Trump. Not only does he have his prostitutes and porn stars sign them as a way to keep them quiet, he's now even having White House staffers sign them to prevent them from speaking the truth. |
|
December 6:
|
AMORALITY
|
|
December 5:
|
WHITE CALLER CRIME
Evidently, racism is the new black in Trump's AmeriKKKa -- or should I say orange? -- and his clan couldn't be happier. The dog whistles are gone, replaced by bull horns, PA systems, and social media. It's cool with Trump and the GOP for racists to spew their hatred from the rooftops, and the newest sideline for the deplorables is to call 911 on any person of color who is going about his or her daily routines. A woman stops to refuel her car. Three men wait for a friend in Starbucks. A boy mows a neighbor's yard. A girls operates a lemonade stand. And in each case a white person calls 911 to report the fact that an African-American is...is...doing something -- and they demand that the police do something about it. Yep. White caller crime is widespread and ever-increasing, and Trump and the GOP are grinning like Cheshire cats.
|
|
December 4:
|
THE F-WORD
What a complete hypocrite is Marco Rubio. When he ran for the Senate in 2016, he promised to be a check on Donald Trump. “I will act as a check and balance on whoever the president is even if it is a president from my own party,” he said. What a bunch of jiggery-pokery. Rubio is a fake, and for Trump, he’s quick to roll over with his tail between his legs like an Omega dog, the weakest in the pack. So what, pray tell, is Rubio really concerned about? The F-word: 
It's no wonder the f-word is "routinely used in news stories, tweets etc." We have a racist mob boss in the Oval Office who is striking deals to make the filthy rich filthier, sabotaging health care for millions, separating families and caging children, saddling future generations with a hefty National Debt, destroying the DOJ and obstructing justice, and much, much more.
|
|
December 3:
|
LAUREL and YANNY
Last spring, the Yanny vs. Laurel debate swept the internet -- the biggest controversy to rock the world wide web since the “is the dress blue or white” hullabaloo. The argument centered on an audio clip where some people heard the word “Yanny” while others swore they heard the word “Laurel.” Information about the dispute is HERE.
The Yanny/Laurel debate, though, was nothing new. This debate has been around since the late 1800s when Emmett Lee Dickinson’s sister Pythagoria named two of her seventeen children Yanny and Laurel. Dickinson noticed that whenever Pythagoria would call for Yanny, Laurel would show up, and whenever she would call for Laurel, Yanny would come. Below left: Emmett Lee Dickinson's sister Pythagoria. Center & right: Two of Pythagoria's children -- Yanny (or is that Laurel?) and Laurel (or is that Yanny?).
Honorable Mention: CARAMEL For a short time after the Yanny/Laurel controversy, people debated the word "caramel." Is it pronounced "CARE-a-mel" ...or "CAR-mull"? TBH, we're a bit surprised there was no dispute over the pronunciation of the word "pecan": PEE-can? puh-KAHN? Hmm...and what about PEE-KAHN?
|
|
December 2:
|
EMOTIONAL SUPPORT PEACOCK
UPDATE: Dexter the peacock died on July 22nd of this year after suffering complications related to emotional detachment disorder after his owner Ventiko spent more than one month away camping in an alley behind the Bushwick United Nursery Day School so that she could collect discarded milk cartons to use in a “wearable sculpture.”
|
|
December 1:
|
CROMULENT and EMBIGGEN
It was a dank and Stormy (Daniels) year. The words fell in torrents — oft at occasional intervals, when they plunged in violent tweet storms which swept up the news (for it is in Trump's AmeriKKKa that our scene lies), rattling along with hashtags, and fiercely agitating the resisters who struggled against the dankness. In 2018, "cromulent" and "embiggen" were inducted into the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, so out of the dankness, we culled the first two words for our 2018 "Words of the Year" inventory. "Cromulent" and "embiggen" now join "meh," "jeebus," "avoision," "craptacular" and " Doh!" as words from The Simpsons which are now in the dictionary. Don't have a cow, man. 
Honorable Mention: DANKNESS Criticizing the media for its coverage of a bogus GOP memo on the FBI written by Rep. Devin Nunes, Donald Trump, Jr., tweeted “Democracy Dies in Dankness."
|
Other "Words of the Year" for 2018
Our "Words of the Year" lists from past years:
