Toxic modernity

enunciative dynamics and everyday social life

Abstract

Every year, Oxford University Press, publisher of the world-famous Oxford Dictionary, selects a word to which they attribute the ability to summarize a certain period. In 2018, the word chosen was “toxic”, due to a significant 45% increase in searches for this word by users of the online dictionary. This phenomenon is not exclusive to English; a similar trend can be observed in Portuguese. Nowadays, nominal formations such as “toxic positivity”, “toxic friendship”, “toxic love”, “toxic beauty”, “toxic self-esteem” and “toxic empowerment” find regularity in everyday utterances, tensioning meanings that were previously considered opposite or incompatible. With this in mind, the aim of this work is to investigate how these contemporary tensions materialize through the linguistic form “toxic”, especially in nominal formations that articulate a core-name, associated with positive meaning effects, with the convergent “toxic”, whose scope of meaning is in the sphere of negativity. As corpus selection tools for this study, we used artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) and the Google search engine to collect occurrences in which this tension finds enunciative reasons (Dias, 2018) to materialize. To support our studies, we analyzed the corpus collected from the perspective of Enunciation Semantics or Event Semantics (Guimarães, 2018). Regarding the treatment and analysis of the linguistic forms collected, we used the methodology of enunciative networks, as proposed by Dias (2023). Our results indicate a movement of re-signification arising from the enunciation of these forms, capable of establishing new dynamics for the organization of everyday social life.