"Surreal" has beaten "fascism" to become Merriam-Webster's 2016 word of the year. John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University and author of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English  (Harper Perennial, 2003), and What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be  (Gotham, 2011), talks about why the word defines the year and listeners nominate their own word picks.