We're still here.

Happy New Year!

ADDED: My first wholly unnecessary self-imposed task of 2018 was to look up "survive" in the OED. You can see, without looking it up, that it is made out of the root that means "live" and the prefix that means "over," "above," "higher than," or "on top of." But it doesn't mean that when Mr. X survives Mr. Y, he's living a higher life. It means Y died and X did not.

"I did loue a Lady, But she is dead... Sil. Say that she be: yet Valentine thy friend Suruiues." That's Shakespeare, "Two Gentlemen of Verona." You can also survive some thing or the thing can survive you: "Yea though I die the scandale will suruiue." Also Shakespeare. "Lucrece."

So "survive" implies that something else died. Drudge's headline tells us that 2017 has died and implies, jocosely, that it aimed to kill us. Every year threatens to kill us, and many of us did not survive 2017.

But all who are reading the Drudge headline have survived, and perhaps, finding ourselves in this still-alive condition, we will back off on the hysteria that made 2017 so weird.

Some year out there — if not 2018, then one with a number that's not all that much more than 2018 — is going to kill you, and there's no sense degrading this year or any year with your raging morbid fears.

Lighten up. "Survive" has its "trivial use," the OED tells us, often in the phrase "I'll survive":

1902 R. Kipling Traffics & Discov. (1904) 30 ‘But it'll bore you to death,’ he says... ‘I'll survive,’ I says, ‘I ain't British. I can think,’ I says.
1928 M. Arlen Lily Christine xiii. 240 ‘All this trouble your silly husband has brought on you!’ ‘Oh, we'll survive that,’ she said lightly....
1958 ‘C. S. Forester’ Hornblower in W. Indies 184 ‘I don't envy you, frankly.’ ‘No doubt I'll survive, sir.’

That reminds me. My mother — who wanted to survive to "the year 2000" but died in 1999 — would often respond to complaints and alarmism with a deadpan "You'll survive." I wish I had performed what I now think is the best comic riposte and burst out in song: