If "omicron" - the new COVID-19 variant - isn't the word of the year for 2022, we'll know we have dodged another bullet.
That's because "vaccine" is the 2021 word of the year, so pronounced Monday by the Merriam-Webster dictionary folks.
Unfortunately, it's "one word that carries two huge stories," Peter Sokolowski, the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, told The Associated Press.
Of course, there's the initial story in which scientists quickly went to work in 2020 to develop a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. And then the uglier story in which a vaccine has become a code word for, as the Merriam-Webster editor pointed out, "policy, politics and political affiliation."
For baby boomers, the word "vaccine" probably originally was associated with polio and the miraculous way in which that devastating disease was eliminated by a vaccine developed in the 1950s. Children after that were taken by parents to get polio vaccines, but inoculations for other diseases were categorized as "shots." As in, "Today, we're going to get our booster shots."
Flash forward to 2020.
Then-President Donald Trump had given scientists a big monetary boost to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, the virus that wrought serious illness and death, lockdowns, business closures and a recession. Then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and then-vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris said they didn't want anything to do with the vaccines on the word of Trump.
Once vaccines began to be distributed and then Biden and Harris were inaugurated, the new president and vice president couldn't promote the vaccines enough. So, many Trump supporters said they didn't want to have anything to do with the vaccines on the word of the new office-holders.
Biden and Harris were wrong, and the Trump-supporting vaccine holdouts are wrong. Thus, the political story of the word.
Speaking of political stories, among Merriam-Webster's runners-up for word of the year:
- Insurrection: Pundits and left-wing politicians gave this term to the riot of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an effort to stop the certification of the 2020 vote. As such, searches in Merriam-Webster for the word increased by 61,000% over 2020. Commentaries since have questioned whether the word fits what actually happened, but that hasn't stopped the use of the word.
- Infrastructure: Congress recently passed, and Biden signed, a bill that is supposed to deliver help for the nation's highways, bridges and other transportation-related areas. The president's critics have said the bill contained far too little money for such things and too much for Democratic pet projects, but it did have a minimum of bipartisan support when it was passed. Trump had wanted such a bill during his term but found no interest from Democrats, who were focused on a now-discredited probe that attempted to tie Trump to Russian influence in the 2016 election. Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly used the term in talking to the Pachyderm Club Monday, saying the city was "way behind the eight-ball" when it comes to infrastructure, that he supported the Biden administration bill and that money from it would help with the city's roads, on which he said the city should have been spending $6 or $7 million a year, "and we were spending three."
- Perseverance: The term, suggested in an essay contest by Alexander Mather, a 14-year-old seventh-grader at a Virginia school, is the name of NASA's latest Mars rover, which landed on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021. We would suggest it also applies to the American people (and those across the world) in their ability to weather the COVID-19 virus, an illness that came with no game plan. They have endured lockdowns, masks, social distancing and political infighting, among other things, and many have emerged with renewed spirits, entrepreneurial ideas and hope despite all that has been thrown at them.
- Nomad: We couldn't have told you this since we gave up on award shows when they became politicized some years ago, but a film called "Nomadland" won the 2021 Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Director. We still think of "nomad" from childhood stories as a solitary figure, or figures, trudging through barren, perhaps Middle East, lands.
The other words that made the top 10 are "cicada," the flying insect which reportedly had a U.S. invasion in 2021 (though many people never saw any); "guardian," which will become the new politically correct nickname of Major League Baseball's Cleveland Indians in the 2022 season; "cisgender," the gender with which someone was born; "woke," someone or something charged with political correctness (and which easily would have been our word of the year for all the damage it has caused); and "murraya," which is a tropical tree and the word that won the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee for 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde.