Donald Trump may not be Time’s person of the year (yet), but Ivanka Trump indirectly just won a big award of her own. As reported by USA Today, her ignorance of what “complicit” means has helped make it Dictionary.com’s Word Of The Year, with her multiple misuses of the word in 2017 coinciding with major spikes in complicit-based traffic on the Dictionary.com site. Also, it’s probably just an important word for everybody to know these days, what with all of the people in the government happily going along with whatever horrible shit Donald Trump and Paul Ryan try to get away with.
Complicit, for those who are Ivanka Trump, means “choosing to be involved in an illegal or questionable act,” particularly one that involves other people. Basically, it means that you went along with someone as they did something bad. Here it is in a sentence: Everybody who stands with Donald Trump is complicit in every racist, sexist, and generally evil policy he endorses.
As we previously reported, Ivanka Trump has a tenuous relationship with words, once saying she was “complicit” in Trump’s agenda as if it was a good thing, and the first spike in people looking up the word’s definition came alongside a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Scarlett Johansson played Ivanka Trump in a commercial for a new perfume called “Complicit”—tag line: “For the woman who could stop all this, but won’t.” The next spike came after Ivanka Trump went on CBS This Morning and admitted that she didn’t know what the word meant, a surprising thing to learn about someone who definitely didn’t get where she is because of her last name.
You can find more information on complicit—and other big words of 2017—at this link.