Try something in between: “surreal,” which is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, unveiled Monday.
Meaning “unbelievable, fantastic,” the word joins Oxford’s “post-truth” as the year’s top choices.
“It just seems like one of those years,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large.
The company tracks year-over-year growth and spikes in lookups of words on its website to come up with the top choice. This time around, there were many periods of interest in “surreal” throughout the year, often after a tragedy, Sokolowski said.
Major spikes came after the Brussels terrorist attack in March and again in July, after the Bastille Day massacre in Nice. Both received huge attention around the globe and had many in the media reaching for “surreal” to describe both the physical scenes and the “mental landscapes,” Sokolowski said.
The single biggest spike in lookups came in November, he said, specifically November 9, the day Donald Trump went from candidate to president-elect.
The word “surreal” didn’t exist until around 1924, after a group of European poets, painters and filmmakers founded a movement they called Surrealism. They sought to access the truths of the unconscious mind by breaking down rational thought (it came into its own in 1937).
Carpe Diem Surreal Life,
David Kuhn
CarpeDiem-Life.com
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