The passage of time itself became seemingly unreliable this year, as some days felt like a week while some months flew by in an instant. 2020 was not a year we all could have prepared for but it was a year that pushed us to become stronger, demand more from our elected officials and fight for the lives of Black people like we have never done before. These three words, Black Lives Matter, resurrected yet again to help remind the world that our fight for racial justice must happen through mass protests, electoral justice and the fight to defund and ultimately abolish the state of policing, and imprisonment as we know it. A year in which Black people and our allies rallied around the globe to reckon with 400 years of racial terror. The year where Black communities were ravaged by the twin pandemics: state violence and Covid-19. But not a single human being in the entire world would have predicted what came in 2020. There is often a collective commitment from people to shed the toxic habits we developed the year before, while pushing to unlock the door of possibilities for the year to come. We asked Patrisse Cullors, co-founder and executive director of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, to share her experience with the movement in 2020.Įvery new year brings curiosity and excitement. But here are the 20 words and phrases we think capture what it felt like to be alive in this unprecedented year of our quar, 2020. And for the first time since 2004, when Oxford Languages, the publisher of the O.E.D., started choosing a Word of the Year, it declined to pick just one. The sheer breadth of words that were popularized this year - everything from medical jargon to social media-friendly shorthand - was particularly unusual, Ms. In her more than 20 years with the O.E.D., she said, “I can’t think of anything that has been similar.” “What’s fascinating about this year is that so many of these words have gone from being words that we had maybe heard of and we might have used very occasionally, but they’ve now gone to basically inform almost every single conversation that we have,” said Fiona McPherson, a new words editor at the Oxford English Dictionary. But all of them serve a purpose in these most uncertain times. Some are technical, like super-spreader event and aerosol droplets some are packed with cultural meaning, like systemic racism and panic shopping and others still, like maskne and walktails, are just goofy little turns of phrase that let us find a drop of joy in this disastrous year. Some are new to the popular vernacular, like quarantine pod, while others are just newly relevant after long histories as specialized terms, like contact tracing. This year has given us scores of new words, phrases, expressions and metaphors. Imagine explaining that sentence to yourself in December 2019. Happy Blursday! Now quit doomscrolling, grab a quarantini and please keep social distancing.