https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63798242
I do think this a good choice. First there's the delicious irony of their using Internet interactions, the Holy Grail of our time, as the metric to annoint "gaslight" as Media Press Release of the Year, thus adding to the noise. But then, we have the fact that it's true. Anyway, Gaslight is a classic old flick, and the mood it generates is one that I have experienced many times in trying to deal with the decline and fall of US media into one true and holy dystopian semiotic horror show.Searches on its website for the word have spiked by 1,740% in 2022, according to the company.
Gaslighting is the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one's own advantage.
"In this age of misinformation - of 'fake news', conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deep fakes - gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time," Merriam-Webster said in a statement on Monday.
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In the UK, things are a bit different.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-63458467
This is the first time I've seen "permacrisis" and I must say I like it. It wasn't based on a metric, so US business types will discount it, but it works. I've always called it "Perpetual Crisis Mode," and in my media studies I came to know it well. This, though, is a shorter word for it.The Collins dictionary has chosen "permacrisis" as the UK word of the year.
Permacrisis - a word describing the feeling of living through a period of war, inflation, and political instability - has been chosen as Collins Dictionary's word of the year.
It "sums up just how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people", said Alex Beecroft, head of Collins Learning.
It led Collins's annual compilation of 10 words or phrases which "reflect our ever-evolving language and the preoccupations of those who use it".
But is it catchy enough for Americans? We're a tough audience. We're being gaslighted for sure, and we do lurch from one crisis to another, so maybe indeed it's all one big crisis. Maybe the system just isn't working very well, and there's no viable way to change it in a timely manner.
When you put both words together, the result makes me think that we've just summed up 2022 though.