【2024 Archives】

Though it's officially 2017024 Archives the world is still trying to recover from the 🗑 🔥 that was 2016.

While the year provided us with enough words to form a glossary, a few in particular were powerful enough to earn the "Word of the Year" title.

Now, thanks to The American Dialect Society (ADS) — a group composed of academics, writers, students and more — the eloquent phrase, "dumpster fire" will be joining the ranks of 2016's definers.

The society named "dumpster fire" its 27th annual Word of the Year on Jan. 6 because it best represented "the public discourse and preoccupations of the past year."

After voting on the term, which was commonly used to describe the 2016 presidential election, the society thought it would be wise to include a visual representation (🗑 🔥 ) in the form of emoji, so the world could better imagine the flaming trash receptacle that we experienced.

"As 2016 unfolded, many people latched on to dumpster fire as a colorful, evocative expression to verbalize their feelings that the year was shaping up to be a catastrophic one," said Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee. "In pessimistic times, dumpster fire served as a darkly humorous summation of how many viewed the year’s events."

Though "dumpster fire" does sound grim, the world did have some fun with it. In fact, to warm our cold hearts during the holiday season, the folks at progressive digital agency Revolution Messaging went so far as to create a "Trumpster Fire," a Donald Trump-inspired yule log of flaming trash.

While various other Words of the Year were chosen by dictionaries, they could all mostly be linked back to the president-elect and the current political climate around the world.

Oxford Dictionaries decided on "post-truth," used throughout 2016 in the context of Brexit and the U.S. presidential election. Merriam-Webster elected the word "surreal" after searches spiked following the election in November, and Dictionary.com chose "xenophobia" in response to the Brexit vote and the various racist and misogynistic comments made throughout Trump's campaign.

Here's to hoping 2017 is not another 🗑 🔥 .