When you’re a public figure, you know you’re gonna get flak from some haters every now and again. Even J.K. Rowling has to deal with Twitter trolls. No public figure — beloved or reviled — is safe. We even get a get our own fair share of salty comments on 22 Words. Not that it hurts our feelings, or anything (*wipes tear*).
Anyway, you expect to get trolled by people, but you might not expect the dictionaries to come for you. But that’s exactly what happened after Vice President Mike Pence was very flattering toward Donald Trump during a recent cabinet meeting.
(The same racist, homophobic, sexist cloth. Cloth you might expect to see draped over your grandma’s old, dusty furniture that nobody likes, but which somehow ended up in the house anyway.)
That is, “a self-seeking, servile flatterer; fawning parasite.”
As you might imagine, responses to Dictionary.com’s epic tweet were, um, mixed…
Because even providing a definition from a dictionary can be a political statement these days. Apparently.
Neal then said he’d take his dictionary-ing business elsewhere, to Merriam-Webster.
Merriam-Webster is kinda the OG of trolling politicians with ultra-timely definitions.
(A fact that we never thought we’d be writing about in 2017, but here we are!)
Both for providing much-needed definitions to words we don’t know and for refusing to silently watch the world crumble. It may seem small, but Dictionary.com tweeting about the word “sycophant” (and making “complicit” their Word of the Year) is exactly the kind of thing people need to see right now.