Hawks
Haggard
WORDS · LANGUAGE · ETYMOLOGY
WORD OF THE YEAR 2019: FALLACILOQUENCE 28%
(n.) deceitful speech, the deliberate telling of lies and falsehoods
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Back in 2016, Oxford Dictionaries made post-truth their word of the year. Showing how much the tide of misinformation has failed to abate since then, this year you voted fallaciloquence—a word for deliberately deceitful speech—the 2019 Haggard Hawks Word of the Year.
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Proving that this is nothing new, this is a word that dates back to the mid 1600s (but with the way things are going at the moment, may yet see its heyday in the years to come). This year’s poll proved a tight race in the end, however, with the winner scraping just over one-quarter of the votes. If you’re looking for something a little more positive to see out the year, ultimately, our second-place word might be a more comforting option.
THE SHORTLIST
symmachy 22%
(n.) the act of working together against a common enemy
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arriviste 19%
(n.) someone who ambitiously and ruthlessly advances themselves to a high-ranking position, which they are largely unfit for or unworthy of
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traumatropism 18%
(n.) the regrowth of a plant or tree, after earlier trauma or destruction
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afterworld 12%
(n.) a future state of existence; a later generation​
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Arriviste was one of the most popular words on the HH feed in 2019. Borrowed into English from French in the nineteenth century, it’s a term ​for someone who ruthlessly or ambitiously secures a position of power, often despite their clear unworthiness for the job. It’s by no means a modern phenomenon (we’ve been using this word since 1895), but given some of the powerful figures that led us through 2020, it was perhaps no surprise this word took an impressive one-fifth of the votes.