Copyright © Françoise Herrmann
Merriam-Webster, the largest American dictionary, selected the term 'polarization' as the 2024 Word Of The Year (WOTY). A term that spiked in the dictionary’s record of online searches. A term arising in a presidential election year in the United States. Although oddly enough, according to Merriam-Webster, this was a term that both political parties used, and agreed on, despite the sharp divergences of their campaigns.
Merriam-Webster's definition of the term 'polarization' is the following:
“division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.”
Originally, however, the term came into the English language via science. The science of electricity, as early as the 1800s.
The term 'polarization' competed with other 2024 terms, such as totality, demure, fortnight, pander, resonate, allision, weird, cognitive and democracy. Terms that also arose in the US presidential campaign, or Taylor Swift’s spectacular concert tours, and when the container ship Dali struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing the bridge to collapse.
Reference
Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 2024
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