So it came to pass on December 6, 2017, that Time magazine surprised the artful dealer finishing his notable first year in the White House, to light instead on a host of women given the name “silence breakers.” These, in Time’s view, were the real Persons of the Year 2017. This being the 21st century, Time also recognized them by the hashtag they were using: #MeToo.
It’s worthy of note that the term and symbol hashtag itself is barely a decade old, having spread from its beginning in Twitter to become routine, and indeed often a necessity in internet communication. In 2012 it earned recognition as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year, and it begat a new grammatical category, because after a hashtag anything grammatical goes: a word, a phrase, a whole sentence. The hashtag returned as victor as the dialect society’s Word of the Year for 2014, #blacklivesmatter.
It’s perhaps also worthy to note that the category Word of the Year, in the view of the linguists of the American Dialect Society, along with dictionary makers and others choosing WOTYs, is not limited to a single word. This was true even before the advent of the hashtag. The society’s WOTY for 1991 was “mother of all —,’ Saddam Hussein’s epithet for the battles that would become the first Gulf War; for 1993,"information superhighway” (the internet, of course); for 1995, “World Wide Web"; for 1997, “millennium bug,” … and then for 2016, “dumpster fire.”
And so Time designated its Person of the Year 2017 with the two-word phrase “silence breakers.”
What the WOTY will be on January 5, when the ADS makes its choice, nobody knows. It could be one of the many words now filling the expanded Trumpiverse, or something quite different like “fake news.” Time (not Time) will tell.
