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2024 Rogue Wordiness Rampant

Immagine del redattore: Peter ByrnePeter Byrne

Aggiornamento: 5 gen



Are you like me astounded by the appearance of overwhelm as a noun? We will have to fall in line. It’s proliferating like bad news. Now, everyone knows the verb to overwhelm but the noun that first appeared in 1596 AD didn’t last—that is—until 2024 when it’s everywhere. “How I beat overwhelm”, a woman who gave up using makeup wrote in a serious London newspaper in December. It’s now used as a synonym for the noun overload, adding ounces more emotional weight. “He tried to reduce the overwhelm of big city living.”  Swallow the new usage according to the tasteless great law of language: If it’s said and written…Maybe even welcome it as a candidate for word of the year 2024.


But there’s competition. We have already noted the proposal of enshittification*. The Oxford English dictionary chooses brainrot, “An inability to think clearly caused by excessive consumption of low-quality online content”. Collins Dictionary favours the more snappy, brat. Not in the accepted sense of a misbehaving child, but rather as an adjective meaning, “Characterised by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude”.  Its shift in meaning attributed solely to Charli XCX’s album by that name. “‘Brat summer established itself as an aesthetic and a way of life.”


If that seems frivolous to you, consider a doomster’s proposal, family annihilation. It describes a particularly American crime. A child picks up a gun, murders multiple close family members and then itself. It’s mass murder of which there have been 29 in the USA in 2024.


Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, feeling the overwhelm of the noisy presidential election, settled on polarization as its word of the year, “A group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.” That sounds neat and clean if you banish from your head the picture of a doddering Biden and a ranting Trump.


But lets scrape clean our enshittified shoes and reach for a bitter laugh with weaponised incompetence, a term coined by the Wall Street Journal and certainly worthy of competing.   First meaning how employees avoid added tasks by denying their ability to carry them out, it has now entered the gender wars as the can’t-do defense or “lazy, misogynistic behaviour exhibited by men in heterosexual relationships, where they pretend – or genuinely believe – they are incapable of performing basic household and childcare tasks. They often blame their lack of experience or skill, rather than acknowledging the reality that women are socialised to manage a home, a family, and themselves in ways that men historically have not been. Their feigned incompetence is, in fact, malicious, as it places an unfair burden on their partners.”


Virtual assistant was everywhere in 2024 and a real nag in the kitchen. We wanted to shout back at her that she was only a cheap glass ball that we would switch off if she didn’t shut up. Amazon, whose creature she is, never explained why they gave her the female name, Alexa. Is it because we can’t imagine a woman doing  anything more than being a chef’s helper? Or are we simply dropping a vowel and confusing chef with chief? Amazon goes on to tell us that the question most asked their Frankenstein offspring over the year was What does AI mean? Her snappy reply was artificial intelligence. But Alexa had nothing to say about why the experts on one side predict that AI will terminate us every one and on the other that it will end all our problems. Maybe it will do both.


The Cambridge Dictionary sneaks a dark horse into the contest with manifest. No, not the 600 year old meaning to show something clearly, but with a new twist,”To use specific practices to focus your mind on something you want, to try to make it become a reality”. Screwy? No more than social media that used the word so often the Cambridge Dictionary website was asked 130,000 times what the word  had come to mean. Into the dictionary it went in 2023. Now we have to fight off manifesting influencers along with other pests.

The American Dialect Society has never left the word of the year end the twelfth month with a full stop. Their motto like their country’s empire is excess or bust. They pronounce on nine categories of word of year: the most useful, most likely to succeed, most political, most informal, most AI related,  most creative as well the digital word of the year, the acronym of the year and the euphemism of the year. No fear I shall drag you through that repertory. However, in the last full harvest found there are some pungent items. Who can refuse a smile at the informal, dickriding, “Currying favor or sucking up to someone”.  Or, to stick with bodily parts, not go along with the most creative, assholocene, “The current era of human history defined by the ubiquity of assholes.” The most likely to succeed, cunty, Having an audaciously exceptional appearance or displaying fierce femininity”  poses a philosophical  problem. Why is the age-old derogatory word prick negative and cunty so flamboyantly positive? Signs of the times?


The American Dialect Society’s devotion to the word of the year began in 1990 with bushlips, “Insincere political rhetoric”. Remember, ”Read my lips: no new taxes,” the words spoken by American presidential candidate George H. W. Bush at the 1988 Republican National Convention as he accepted the nomination.


In 1755,  Samuel Johnson in the preface to the first modern English dictionary said the last word on new words or neologisms. He has been considered a starchy elitist but made lovable by three centuries passing.


“The language most likely to continue long without alteration, would be that of a nation raised a little, and but a little, above barbarity, secluded from strangers, and totally employed in procuring the conveniencies of life; wither without books…men thus busied and unlearned, having only such words as common use requires, would perhaps long continue to express the same notions by the same signs, But no such constancy can be expected in a people polished by arts, and classed by subordination, where one part of the community is sustained and accommodated by the labour of the other. Those who have much leisure to think, will always be enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations of words.”


As for neologisms lately in the running for honours, Dr Johnson might have approved of stochastic parrot, “Large language model that can generate plausible synthetic text without having any understanding” . But how could he not nix skibidi: “Nonsense word popularized by the YouTube animated series skibidi Toilet? Who knows, the old boy might  have liked gyat, gyatt: “Exclamation expressing surprise, excitement, or admiration when seeing someone with a large butt.”

If Dr Johnson is out of tune with New Year’s Eve fireworks, we can chortle over the Washington Post’s annual Neologism Contest. Readers supply alternative meanings for common words. Winners include: the verb Lymph, “To walk with a lisp”; nouns Gargoyle, “Olive-flavoured mouthwash”;  and Flatulence, " Vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller”.


That’s the last laugh of the old year. Get ready for 2025 with Running Scared emblazoned on your t-shirt. The word apocalypse has been bandied about since 1979 and Francis Ford Coppola’s movie of that name with Now prefixed to arouse jaded customers. Since the authority of international enforcers of decency has been trampled and climate change pushed into the never-never, we are  ready for the real thing. What kind of ad-man’s line  will sell it? Why not,  See the final performance of the Apocalypse Show from the mosh pit.**

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Notes

*Sally Rooney’s so Polite People

**A mosh pit is the area in front of stage where the more hysterical consumers contort at a rock concert

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