Cancel Culture: Word of the Year?

The Macquarie Dictionary has picked ‘cancel culture’ as its word of 2019, beating out a number of other new and quirky terms such as ‘whataboutism’ ‘robodebt’ and ‘thicc’. Cancel culture has been defined as ‘the attitudes within the community which calls for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure’. Some people who have fallen victim to cancel culture are Taylor Swift, Lena Dunham, LeBron James and Kevin Hart. We had Nick Wilson, an associate linguistics professor from Macquarie Uni talk to us a bit more about this term.