2017 is coming to an end and the various websites are already starting to prepare the totals.
One of the first sites to publish the conclusions is Dictionary.com, a website that announced its word of the year.
Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
You can support us for as little as $1 via PayPal at office@jewishbusinessnews.com.
Thank you.
The site declared that complicit is the word of the year in 2017, thanks in part to a Saturday Night Live skit in which actress Scarlett Johansson played Ivanka Trump, who defined the word “choosing to be involved in illegal or dubious action” “Involvement in an offense.”
Complicit means “choosing to be involved in an illegal or questionable act, especially with others; having partnership or involvement in wrongdoing.” Or, put simply, it means being, at some level, responsible for something . . . even if indirectly.
The word first appeared in the headlines in March, when the satire Saturday Night Live (SNL) broadcast a false advertisement for the new daughter’s first name, complicit. Johansson played Ivanka. The slogan was “the perfume for a woman who can stop all this, but does not do it.”
“I do not know what it means to be a collaborator.” Ivanka, who serves as a senior adviser to her father the president, tried to defend herself and said: “I hope history proves that I did a good job. And, more importantly, my father’s administration is the success I know he is. ”
In October, the word gained further interest after Sen. Jeff Flake, considered a prominent opponent of Trump, resigned from the Senate with the following statement: “I am not willing to be a collaborator or sit in silence” in front of Trump’s priesthood.
In addition to the political contexts, complicit has recently surfaced again in the context of the Hollywood sexual harassment affair, and the question of whether people knew about Harvey Weinstein’s actions and remained silent or collaborated.
Although complicit does not have a particularly positive connotation, but it is an improvement from last year, Dictionary.com’s word of the year was xenophobia. Similarly, the Collins Dictionary last year named Pike News as the word of the year, while in the dictionary, Webster was content with the title “surreal.”
