Toxic is by definition a superlative word. It refers to poison; once taken there is no going back. And it stands for extreme misconduct that ruins people and the environment.
When #MeToo was a fact, “toxic” came to the fore. The man was. Him and his manhood. Subsequently, the working atmosphere also became ‘toxic’. But since then the word has faded into the background in this context in our language area. It is now ‘unsafe’ in the office, where ‘bullying’ is commonplace; and the bellowing man and, increasingly, woman, have “fits of rage” and display “verbally and physically intimidating behavior.”
It seems we’re looking for more nuance now, being more specific about behavior, unlike when we exposed Harvey Weinstein, when we were in a state of shock and needed one word to describe societal and personal trauma.
Remarkably, ‘toxic’ is alive and well in the Anglo-Saxon media. Recently, the word once again dominated the front page of theguardian.com: Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s legacy was ‘toxic’; and a review of a new post-apocalyptic novel mentioned a “toxic Eden.”
Now British journalism is not averse to a hyperbole here and there, but substantively the use of the word is justified. In 2018, the Oxford dictionary named ‘toxic’ word of the year precisely because of its many literal and metaphorical meanings. In addition to ‘masculinity’, ‘relationship’ and ‘culture’, words that could be used in combination with ‘toxic’ included ‘chemical’, ‘substance’, ‘environment’, ‘algae’ and ‘air’.
But there’s more to “toxic,” which actually pops out of your mouth when you say it out loud. According to a publication by the Netherlands Institute of Biology, toxicology arose because people discovered that all kinds of plants and animals can be poisonous.
Those who used bows and arrows in antiquity smeared the arrowhead in poison — toxin (Greek) and toxic (Latin) — for the adventurous weapon, toxon (Greek), to make even more deadly.
It is precisely in the old stories that poison is central, for example when Cleopatra, at least with Shakespeare, finally brings toxic suicide weapons: two asp adders. After a bite on the arm and one on the chest, she was done.
Unfortunately, a snake bite as a cause of death is unlikely. An investigation by a German toxicologist in 2010 found that Cleopatra probably died from ingesting hemlock and aconite mixed with opium to soften the dying process.
That poisoning happened all the time in Antiquity. Think of the poisoned cup that Socrates was given. Viewed from our present time, ‘poisonous’ was already metaphorical in nature, ‘toxic’. The Egyptian queen contended with men—Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian—who brought destruction with him. It is not for nothing that the Roman emperor Sulla banned poisoning people about fifty years earlier.