‘Toxic’ was declared the word of 2018. Let’s make the year ahead one to shed our emotional load, and detoxify our relationships
The Westernised idea of detoxifiction has been around as long as yoga pants, herbal smoothies, green tea, maybe even (gut) colonisation. So when the wise chaps at Oxford Dictionaries decided that the 2018 word of the year was ‘toxic’, we dug deeper to find out why. Apparently, we’d looked it up 45% more times than the previous year, in a sort of affirmation that our personal traumas had become collective ones, with the rise of the #MeToo movement, radicalism, and fake news.