A lot of people seem to be surprised by the Oxford Dictionaries’ 2017 Word of the Year, which many of us either have never heard or only heard so long ago that we’ve probably forgotten it. BBC News reports that the word is “youthquake.”
The story reports that the choice of the word, which was coined in the 1960s by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, reflects a “political awakening” among millennial voters in 2017.
The report quotes Oxford Dictionaries’ Casper Grathwohl saying it was “not an obvious choice.” He also said the term’s use in everyday speech increased five-fold during 2017.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “youthquake” as the “series of radical political and cultural upheavals occurring among students and young people in the 1960s.”
Other words that were reportedly in contention in 2017 include antifa, broflake, kompromat, unicorn and milkshake duck.
Please comment if you think “youthquake” is a lame choice for word of the year — or if you think we’re lame for never hearing it used.
It would be hard to come up with a more lame choice on this side of the pond, after the mass lethargy of the millennials following the defeat of Bernie Sanders was largely responsible for electing Trump.