Word of the Year is about as on-the-pulse as a dabbing politician | Stephanie Merritt

Collins Dictionary's annual lunge for the zeitgeist is here again. But as I know all too well, sometimes the zeitgeist is best left alone

"Fake news!" He shouts it so often that it's become meaningless. We've learned to tune it out now, the way you do when your toddler bangs their fists on their high chair and yells "toast!" for so long the word has become divorced from the thing they thought they wanted, it's just turned into a noise that means "give me attention!"

Yet this now-empty phrase, which in his tiny hands has come to mean the exact opposite of what it was intended to mean, has just been declared Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary, which reports a 365% increase in its usage over 2017, ahead of other contenders such as "Corbynmania" (which seems so 2015, but apparently is enjoying a resurgence this year), "Insta" and "gender-fluid".

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