NEW YORK (CBS News) — Russian election influence, the ever-widening sexual harassment scandal, mass shootings and the opioid epidemic helped elevate the word “complicit” as Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2017.
Look-ups of the word increased nearly 300 percent over last year as “complicit” hit just about every hot button from politics to natural disasters, lexicographer Jane Solomon told The Associated Press ahead of Monday’s formal announcement of the site’s pick.
“This year a conversation that keeps on surfacing is what exactly it means to be complicit,” she said. “Complicit has sprung up in conversations about those who speak out against powerful figures in institutions, and those who stay silent.”
The first of three major spikes for the word struck March 12. That was the day after “Saturday Night Live” aired a sketch starring Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump in a glittery gold dress peddling a fragrance called “Complicit” because: “She’s beautiful, she’s powerful, she’s complicit.”
The bump was followed by another April 5, also related to Trump, Solomon said. It was the day she appeared on “CBS This Morning,” where co-host Gayle King asked her, among other things, about the sketch and stories that she and her husband, Jared Kushner, were complicit in White House actions.
“If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit,” Trump said. “I don’t know that the critics who may say that of me, if they found themselves in this very unique and unprecedented situation that I am now in, would do any differently than I’m doing. So I hope to make a positive impact.
“I don’t know what it means to be complicit, but, you know, I hope time will prove that I have done a good job and, much more importantly, that my father’s administration is the success that I know it will be.”
Find out other words that have been added to the dictionary, here.
