Word of 2017? Bet you can't pick just one -- Dec. 21, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

It’s not easy to summarize a year in a single word, especially a year as tumultuous and polarized as this one.

Maybe that’s why lexicographers’ choices for the Word of the Year 2017 all have a political hue.

Collins Dictionary chose one of President Donald Trump’s favorites -- “fake news” -- as its word for 2017. Definition: “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news.”

Merriam-Webster picked “feminism.” You’d think everybody would know it means “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.”

But when Merriam-Webster analyzed “lookups” of words online to gauge public interest, feminism was a top lookup of the year, first spiking after the Women’s March on Washington in January. As discussions of feminism evolved with the news, interest in the word kept spiking, the dictionary said.

Dictionary.com went for “complicit” after lookups surged following a Saturday Night Live parody commercial featuring Scarlett Johansson as a sultry Ivanka Trump. The fake ad was for “Complicit,” “the fragrance for the woman who could stop all this . . . but won’t.”

Lookups of complicit surged again after Trump said she didn’t know what it meant to be complicit.

The esteemed Oxford Dictionaries chose “youthquake,” a 1965 creation repurposed to reflect the significant influence of young voters in the UK’s snap election last June.

“It is a rare political word that sounds a hopeful note,” said Casper Grathwohl, president of the dictionaries of the Oxford University Press, although he acknowledged: “It’s true that it’s yet to land firmly on American soil but strong evidence in the UK calls it out as a word on the move.”    

Talking about words on the move, where’s covfefe when we need it?

Covfefe epitomized President Donald Trump and his tweet machine. It’s a made-up word he used in a truncated tweet a little after midnight on May 31: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe” 

The tweet was later deleted, but then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer, in an explanation worthy of the Alice in Wonderland School of Spin, told reporters, “The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.”

Instead of trying to settle on one Word of the Year, perhaps we should think of 2017 as the Year of Words. Plural.

No president ever word-bombed the nation the way Trump does, instantly sharing his mood swings with the masses.  

Trump weaponized words, but he wasn’t the only one. North Korea President Kim Jong Un must have been thumbing through an old thesaurus when he called Trump “a mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” A dotard is someone who’s elderly and senile. 

The year began with Trump’s dystopian vision of America. Inaugural addresses typically play to the nation’s hopes and dreams; his stoked fears with words like  “carnage.”  

The new administration delivered “alternative facts,” White House aide Kellyanne Conway’s infelicitous phrase for Spicer’s lies about the size of the crowd at the inauguration.

The year is ending with the administration denying a Washington Post report that the Department of Health and Human Services had banned the Centers for Disease Control from using seven words in its 2019 budget request. The words are: diversity, 

entitlement, evidence-based, fetus, science-based, transgender and vulnerable.

HHS strenuously denied the prohibition, and CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald tweeted, “I want to assure you there are no banned words at CDC.”

An analysis by Science Insider, though, found the words already had been used far less in CDC’s 2018 budget request earlier this year than in the three previous Obama CDC requests.

The New York Times subsequently reported it wasn’t a ban so much as a recommendation to avoid language that might slow or derail approval of the budget by Republicans. So it appears red-flag words were banned as a political strategy.   

A firestorm ensued, of course, as free speech still matters.

The American Dialect Society, a group of linguists and other academics, will vote for its Word of the Year Jan. 5.

It would be nice to think its word describing this rancorous year could be hopeful for the future.

But that’s unlikely. Its choice last year was more prophetic than anyone thought. Remember “dumpster fire”?

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Regrets, they have many -- April 13, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER  

This is the apology spring.

Not since President Bill Clinton went on his mea culpa tour in 1998 to atone for Monica Lewinsky have so many politicians, public figures and corporations done indefensible things for which they’re oh-so-sorry.

“I’m having to become quite an expert in this business of asking for forgiveness,” Clinton commented at the time.

In the last month or so, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, United CEO Oscar Munoz, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, and Pepsi, among others, have had to make public apologies.

Circumstances varied greatly, but the wave of apologies shows the power of social media to record and broadcast misdeeds and arouse anger. More telling, the need for apologies shows that even in our seemingly anything-goes culture, words and actions still count.

Standards of decency and behavior still exist, and public figures and companies cross some lines at their peril.

Exhibit A is Spicer’s preposterous comment at a press briefing Tuesday that “even Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons” as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did. Spicer also referred to Nazi death camps as “Holocaust centers.”

Amid calls for him to be fired, Spicer offered a full-throated apology the next morning, calling his remarks “inexcusable and reprehensible.”

“It is really painful to myself to know I did something like that. I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told MSNBC’s Greta Van Susteren.

His quick and abject apology for an abysmal choice of words may allow Spicer to move on and save his job.

Personal misbehavior often leads to prolonged apologies by politicians trying to survive, a la Bill Clinton. But nothing focuses the mind like potential jail time.

Bentley’s latest apology and resignation as governor Monday came after he entered a plea deal in which he avoided jail in return for pleading guilty to two misdemeanors involving campaign funds. The deal came as impeachment proceedings were to begin and at the conclusion of a sex scandal involving a top aide.

After videos of a passenger being manhandled on an overbooked United plane went viral, CEO Munoz first backed up the airline and blamed the passenger. Then, he apologized in email and on TV, saying he felt “shame” and promising refunds to those who witnessed the “horrific” incident.

It’s possible Munoz felt shame before lawsuits loomed, before calls for a boycott spread, and before United got hammered in China because the mistreated passenger was Asian. But the tone of the response certainly changed when the PR crisis worsened.  

Apologies have to be done right or they can backfire. In the 2006 Virginia Senate campaign, Sen. George Allen attempted to make amends for using an ethnic slur to an Indian-American student who was videotaping Allen’s rallies for opponent Jim Webb. 

“I do apologize if he’s offended by that,” Allen said of the student. The apology was seen as tepid at best, if not insincere. The incident wasn’t the only flub in Allen’s campaign, and he narrowly lost the election.

Fox’s O’Reilly ran into a buzz saw last month when he made a crack that Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters’ hair looked like a “James Brown wig.” It was hardly the worst thing O’Reilly is accused of saying and doing, but going after a congresswoman’s looks is out of bounds. The comment reverberated on the Internet.

“That was stupid. I apologize,” O’Reilly said.

O’Reilly, whose sponsors deserted him in droves after several women accused him of sexual harassment, has gone on vacation.

And then there’s Pepsi’s ad starring celebrity Kendall Jenner defusing a stand-off at a generic protest by offering a police officer a can of Pepsi. The ad was widely seen as insensitive and trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement.

Pepsi first stood by the ad but pulled it hours later.

“Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize,” said the company, which apologized to Jenner as well.  

Saturday Night Live mocked the ad as tone deaf. A non-controversial ad would never have received the attention, which goes to show confession is good for the soul, and an apology can be good for business.  

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Trump's war on facts a losing gambit -- Jan. 26, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

I am 5’10,” speak French like a native and play the piano flawlessly. Oh, and Donald Trump just released his tax returns and resigned as president.

Not one of those facts is real. They’re falsehoods, fibs, fantasy. OK, whoppers.   

They would be lies -- and I a liar -- if I intended to deceive you. I don’t. Like most Americans, I respect facts, evidence and truth, which is more than you can say for President Trump.

Trump’s revolution showed its disdain for science by scrubbing the White House web site of all mention of climate change and gagging the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A president has every right to change policy, but stopping the free flow of facts is wrong. It goes against the grain of our history.

Long before the American Revolution, John Adams, later our second president, said in 1770: “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Americans have prized truth in our leaders, sometimes honored in the breach more than in the observance, since George Washington. The myth of the boy, his hatchet and the cherry tree -- “I cannot tell a lie” – gave generations a role model.  

In the 20^th Century, Jimmy Carter won the White House promising: “I’ll never tell a lie.” People rolled their eyes, but Carter’s earnestness was refreshing after the lyin’ Nixon years and Watergate scandal.

Politicians and presidents do lie, of course, but we’ve never had a president like Trump, who wields fake facts as emotional prods to rile up his followers.  

Trump tried for years to prove the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and said Hillary Clinton and her 2008 campaign started the rumor – claims that were repeatedly debunked and yet built him a following.

He backed off last September when the lie began to impede his path to the White House, still insisting that Clinton started it.

Trump won despite his loose affiliation with truth during the campaign. As president, he has turned to alternative facts.

“Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts” that the crowds at Trump’s inauguration were the biggest ever, despite photo evidence to the contrary, Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, said last Sunday on “Meet the Press.”

Chuck Todd, the show’s moderator, replied, “Alternative facts aren’t facts. They are falsehoods.”

The phrase, alternative facts, was a chilling reminder of George Orwell’s “1984,” a novel published in 1932 that envisions a dystopian future where the Ministry of Truth subverts facts and history. This week, “1984” jumped to No. 1 on Amazon.

Sales of  “1984” have soared 9,500 percent since the Trump inauguration, and publisher Penguin is rushing out a reprint of 75,000 copies.

The Amazon Top 20 included “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis, about the election of an authoritarian president wonderfully named Buzz Windrip, and “Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley, also a dark view of the future where an authoritarian regime quashes thought.  

If Trump’s alternative facts were as benign as his wish for longer fingers or thicker hair, we could ignore them. But he’s no longer a billionaire private citizen with kooky ideas or a candidate crying “rigged election” in case he loses.  

Unable to let go of his baseless claim that he would have won the popular vote were it not for up to five million people illegally voting for Hillary Clinton, the president tweeted his call for a “major investigation” into voter fraud.

No matter that state election officials insist there’s zero evidence of widespread fraud. Voter fraud is one of Trump’s unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

It’s “a longstanding belief he’s maintained,” Sean Spicer, White House Press secretary, told reporters.

It’s encouraging that some powerful Republicans in Congress want no part in investigating this particular longstanding belief of Trump’s.  

“I don’t see any evidence,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told reporters. “But the president has 100,000 people at the Department of Justice, and if he wants to have an investigation, have at it.”

Facts are stubborn things, and people want a president whose facts they can trust. Playing fast and loose with truth is no way to govern.

As someone who hates to lose, Trump should realize this gambit won’t win.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

What will we carry into 2017? -- Dec. 29, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In the classic short story “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien writes about the weight of the things foot soldiers carried in Vietnam.  

These necessities and near necessities were as practical as mosquito repellent, as powerful as anti-personnel mines and as personal as memories.

Rereading the title story in the terrific book published more than 25 years ago, I started thinking about the New Year, what I want to carry into it and what I hope we can leave behind.

In the latter category is the 2016 presidential election. Yes, it was a shock, but we need to let it go. Unfortunately, talking heads aren’t alone in prolonging the agony.

President Barack Obama said this week he could have won the general election had he been able to run again. That’s the kind of wishful thinking Democrats should leave behind with 2016 – and not because the statement is untrue.

It’s unknowable, of course, which makes great fodder for late-night dorm sessions but not productive thought for the rest of us. 

Obama is still the “most admired” man in America, Gallup reports, and nobody worked harder on Hillary Clinton’s behalf than he and first lady Michelle Obama did, in large part because Obama’s legacy was on the line.

But the president’s confident assertion that his message of tolerance, openness, diversity and energy would have mobilized voters and defeated Donald Trump was a self-serving punch in the gut to Clinton and her supporters.

Naturally, though, it was Trump, not Clinton, who reacted.

“NO WAY!” would Obama have won, Trump tweeted. He returned to Obama’s remark in later tweets the way a tongue explores a sore tooth.

Obama, in the podcast interview with his old friend David Axelrod, also said Clinton was too cautious during the campaign because she thought she was winning, but she “performed wonderfully under really tough circumstances.” He blamed the news media for a double standard in reporting negative news about Clinton.

Basically, he did everything but say she pitched great for a girl.

It’s time to stop beating up on Clinton, stop second-guessing her campaign decisions and why she never matched her husband on the stump.

I’d also like to see politicians stop blaming the news media when things don’t go their way, but that’s not happening.

What-ifs keep us focused on the past when we need to be clear-eyed about the policies and ethics of the incoming administration. And there’s plenty for Democrats to do to prepare for the next congressional election. In 2018, Democrats have to defend 10 Senate seats in states Trump carried.

Trump won the White House, if not the popular vote, with promises to roll back the clock at least to pre-Obama days, maybe earlier. No wonder he wants the Rockettes at his inauguration. They performed at George W. Bush’s in 2005 and 2009.

One thing I’d like to see left behind with 2016 is Trump’s tweets. Complicated policies can’t be resolved in 140 characters.

But, says Sean Spicer, incoming White House press secretary and communications director, tweeting is “a really exciting part of the job.”

Trump has a combined total of 39 million followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and that, “allows him to add an element of a conversation that’s never occurred,” Spicer, a Rhode Island native, told a radio station in his home state.

Will Obama tweet? We’ll see. He plans to write another book, speak out when he sees Trump heading in the wrong direction and help develop the next generation of Democratic leaders.

One notion we can leave behind is that the Obamas will strew rose petals in Trump’s path to the White House. No big surprise there since Obama during the campaign called Trump “unfit to serve” and “woefully unprepared” for the job.

It was unrealistic to expect Obama, who sees Trump eager to dismantle everything Obama has done, to be as gracious as George W. and Laura Bush on their way out.

It’s been a tough year, and there aren’t many things I want to carry into 2017. Here’s one: “When they go low, we go high.”

More slogan than reality in 2016, “when they go low, we go high” is a worthy goal for the New Year.

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