BY JOHN PAWLAK
White Rock
Fix Leaven! Picks Devon! Mix Lemon! Tricks Neven! Obviously, I hesitated to write “the numbers”, lest readers suddenly find themselves compelled to bop the hands (palm side up) up and down like mindless piston engines racing to the end of a meme. Recent news articles have bemoaned Dictionary.com’s choice for its “Word of the Year”, but having ridiculous words put on lexical pedestals is nothing new. Next year, a new meaningless string of letters will sit on the throne of linguistic brain rot.
To highlight this fact, we can note that Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 was in fact “Brain Rot”, which was surprisingly appropriate. It turns out that many dictionaries enjoy playing this game, highlighting some word (or phrase) as the year’s popular pedantic parlance. Back in 2022, their choice for the winning word was “goblin mode”, meaning unapologetically self-indulgent. With nearly half a million people voting, “goblin mode” won with 93% of the vote! I’m one of the happy 7% who can unapologetically say that I never heard of that phrase before.
The Australian Word of 2006 (by the Macquarie Dictionary) was “Muffin Top”. A muffin top is the roll of body fat protruding outwards above tight-fitting pants or a bathing suit. Knowing what this word means will make me think twice when eating muffins. Well, probably not.
Speaking of “not”, that too was a Word of the Year, chosen by the American Dialect Society in 1992. Honoring the word “not” was truly an act of genius … not!
In 2007, Merriam Webster’s choice word was “w00t”, which apparently represents happiness or excitement, used primarily in online conversations. When announcing that year’s winner, the Merriam Webster committee wrote, “W00t reflects a new direction in the American language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging”. That’s a long-winded way of saying, “Language is doomed.”
The Association for the German Language certainly has fun competing against other countries to see whose yearly word was the most “wordy”. In 1982, their word was “Ellenbogengesellschaft”, meaning “dog eat dog society”. You can get carpal tunnel syndrome of the tongue just trying to say that word!
Cambridge Dictionary actually did choose a word that I can understand. In 2018, their Word of the Year was “nomophobia”, the fear of being without a mobile phone. We have to admit that mobile phones have boldly taken us to where no one has been before. The cellular Borg has indeed assimilated us.
With all these many words over the many years, it makes me wonder
why the street vernacular of the 80s, “word”, signifying agreement, was
never made word of the year. Having word be the word of the year
would be like … word up, man!
If all this slanguage salts you, gives you the ick, or is piffing you into permacrisis, don’t let it bulldoze you into feeling cheugy. We live on a diet of transitory words minced into a delulu metaverse.
In other words, get used to being bumfuzzled!
If they ever ask me for my suggestion for Word of the Year, it would be “defenestration”. The definition of that word is “the action of throwing a person through a window”. Now that’s a word I can relate to!