Baranyai: Words of the year telling

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Of all the year-end superlatives – best movie villains, worst trends, Time’s person of the year, my favourite is the word of the year. Dictionaries are among the cheekiest institutions of our time, rivalling even the U.S. National Parks Service. Both speak truth to power, and generate top-notch social media content, such as a recent safety reminder featuring a diorama of a gingerbread man snapping a selfie while his buddy is tossed aloft by gingerbread buffalo, his terror etched in icing.

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Like a good haul from a cookie exchange, the collection of words of the year is a seasonal treat with some delightful selections and others, a bit gooey. To create this gift, dictionary editors pore over spikes in word usage, online searches and cultural impact to put forth the words they feel best encapsulate the moment. Sometimes, they put it to a vote.

The winning words of 2024 reflect our online existence, frosted in sarcasm. Oxford’s choice of “brain rot” seems to resonate with Gen Z, signifying both mindless social media content, and the effect of our immersion therein. With evident disdain, Cambridge picked “manifest” (seeking a desired outcome through visualization), which gained steam as a social media trend and popular hashtag. Building on the theme, Dictionary.com chose “demure,” elevating the “very demure, very mindful” catchphrase popularized on TikTok (thus coming full circle with Oxford’s entry, above).

Collins Dictionary, also skewing youthful, chose the title of Charli XCX’s album, “brat,” whose evolving meaning can embrace a party-girl aesthetic or unapologetic confidence. The word blew up when the singer tweeted “kamala IS brat,” a presidential endorsement that established the young entertainer as having more moral courage than some American newspaper owners.

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A more sober take on election division was Merriam-Webster’s “polarization,” with a nod to social media’s role in cementing the rift. Kudos also go to the Economist, which again waded onto dictionaries’ turf with its own bold choice for word of the year – “kakistocracy” – signifying a government by the least competent of its citizens. (The citizen in question is a particularly prolific poster.)

One dictionary danced into the party with an entry of such irresistible humour and social relevance, it left even the most youthful entries feeling stodgy by comparison: the neologism “enshittification,” chosen by Australia’s MacQuarie Dictionary. Tech critic Cory Doctorow coined the colourful term to describe the life cycle of online platforms, from Amazon to TikTok. After building an audience, they claw back value from subscribers, first for the benefit of their business clients, and ultimately their shareholders. Post-Musk Twitter gave a master class in enshittification when it began selling its blue-check verification, rendering the identity-verification feature useless except as a cash grab.

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At least the dictionaries’ announcements have bounced back from darker times. In 2020, the grimly uniform lineup included lockdown, quarantine, pandemic, COVID, and doomscrolling. A year later, we’d progressed to entries such as vaccine, vax and perseverance. By 2022, however our perseverance had been strained by “permacrisis” and “gaslighting.” Oxford trained its spotlight on the “goblin mode” trend – unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy behaviour – a very human response to a permacrisis.

As we continued to battle through hardship, along came a Trojan horse, with ChatGPT and an avalanche of rushed-to-market copycats claiming to make everything easier. A roundup of 2023’s words of the year included AI, hallucinate and authentic, reflecting a preoccupation with the increasingly blurred lines between human-created content and imitation, verifiable fact and invention.

Oxford continued courting youth with “rizz” (charisma), but it was out-abbreviated by MacQuarie, which chose “cozzie livs” for the cost of living crisis. Top marks again, Australia.

write.robin@baranyai.ca

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