Rage-baiting the slop: Why are the words of the year so weird?

Vibe-coding parasocial rage-bait swill — 6-7!

Word-salad it may seem, this musical phrase is really the to the highest degree of import sentence of the year. At least, that’s what the Western world’s various English dictionaries would have us believe; as each represents the “word of the year” (WOTY) selection from a different lexicographic group. 

You’d be excused for seeing a certain pattern here, or being somewhat unhappy about it. From CNN to Fox News, this year’s slew of words-of-the-year have generated what's become a familiar reaction: Questions over whether these sometimes short-lived, sometimes silly — or even nonsensical — words deserve a vaunted place in the hallowed halls of our official language records. 

But given that reaction, why are language experts picking internet-based fads that may fade from use in a year’s time? What arcane process leads to words of the year that vacillate from the brain-numbing (like 2023’s “rizz”) to the politically charged (as in 2021’s “insurrection”)? 

And, given how mad it makes everyone, why are they even bothering to do it at all?

Dictionary.com Names “6-7” its Word of the Year

“I am a huge nerd about it, but I obviously really love doing it,” explained Kelly Wright of the American Dialect Society (ADS), a sociolinguist and lexicographer who runs the society's WOTY nomination process.

“It's a lot of fun — It's the most fun I get to have. Most of the other stuff that I do is not fun at all.”

Part of that fun, she says, comes from the selection process — something that varies widely among various determining bodies, and contributes to the kinds of words that make headlines. 

Take Cambridge Dictionary, for example. According to senior editor Jessica Rundell, their process starts with a tech team compiling a master list of the most looked-up words that year — looking for both general increases over the entire year, and spikes localized around a few weeks of intense interest. 

From there, a group of editors will select relevant words from that list they can “build a story around” — in other words, that can be used to encapsulate certain interests, questions or topics that defined that year. In Cambridge’s case, those words already need to be in their dictionary before consideration.

“When we're choosing a word to go into the dictionary, we look at whether we think it's [going] to last,” Rundell said. “If we see a word, and it comes around one year and then the next year people aren't using it, it's not going to go into the dictionary at all.”

This year, that led to “parasocial”: a word with roots back in the 1950s and the beginning of the TV age. They chose it to define this year because its definition and notoriety have shifted considerably in the internet age.

Collins Dictionary takes a different approach. Samantha Eardley, a member of the Collins Dictionary team, says they build their shortlist from the Collins Corpus — an analytical database with over 20 billion words, updated monthly with new words and meanings. 

They, like most deciding bodies, are fine with two words for a winner, as many new English concepts are named by combining two existing words  — despite the ire it occasionally draws from purists. But similarly to Cambridge, if they believe a word is a passing fad, they generally will not opt to pick it as their WOTY — explaining why they picked the “brand new word” of vibe-coding, while specifically choosing to veto the almost definitely ephemeral 6-7. 

“We also picked it because it was part of the bigger conversation about AI,” she said. “Which, although it has been around obviously for several years now, seemed to really hit a kind of new level of concern in people's minds, and definitely prevalence.”

Then there’s something like Dictionary.com: while they factor in context, Wright said, they strongly rely on website lookups. While that can reflect public debate around how and whether certain words should be defined (such as their 2022 winner, “woman”) it can lead to winners that, some argue, aren’t real words at all.

“That shows us something different than some of these other ones, that are like 'These words have had staying power, long enough to end up with an official definition in our dictionary,'” she said. “Because of that, they are looking at a word-of-the-year, but it's a word-of-the-year from a different perspective — from a lexicographer's perspective.”

Dictionary.com’s WOTY is strongly rooted in the “descriptivist” interpretation of language. While prescriptivists sign on to the idea that dictionaries and lexicologists decide on rules of language that speakers then follow, descriptivists strongly believe that language is defined by how people use it.

Ben Zimmer, a fellow language scholar with the ADS, says descriptivism at that institution goes way back to when the ADS’s Allan Metcalf launched the first of the WOTY searches in 1990, modelling it after Time Magazine's “Person of the Year.” And, as disgruntled readers rediscover year after year that the title once went to Adolf Hitler, it is a tradition the magazine perennial reminds is specifically “not an honour.”

Like the person of the year, Zimmer said, the word of the year points to what most shaped the year — for good or ill. 

“We're not necessarily looking for something that we're saying, ‘Yes, we approve of this,” he said. “It's not like it's voting for best picture at the Oscars.”

For their part, the ADS draws their shortlist from the public via this link, open until midnight on New Year’s Eve. Zimmer said both the link, and the Jan. 9 forum in New Orleans wherein the final winner is chosen, are very much open to the public — and to Canadians. 

Whichever word ends up triumphing, Wright said, she is preparing for the four responses she gets every year: that the word should be a clear political statement, that the word should be devoid of political commentary, criticism that the word has nothing to do with the respondent — or appreciation for choosing a word that reflects the respondent’s background. 

Even already, she said, the collection of winners has spurred conversation: observations around how so many are connected to AI, our fractured sense of connection and a general question mark as to where we’re headed. 

That is despite the fact that it is virtually impossible to tell whether any of them will stick around: while their first winner, “bushlips” has more or less disappeared from popular discourse, its immutable status as a WOTY helps give insight into what people thought, wondered and argued about in that year.

That could be the case for Canada's inaugural WOTY: this year's "maplewash" — referring to the deceptive practice of making products look more Canadian — which somehow narrowly beat "elbows up."

But regardless of your opinion on whether any of this year’s winners are truly “words of the year,” the reflection and introspection they’ve inspired around the changing nature of language has always been the point. 

“We spend a lot of time looking at language like an entomologist, where you would pin a bug to a board,” she said. “That's not how it works. It is completely moving all the time.… Like, the diagram of the heart is one thing, but the living, beating heart inside all of us is a different thing. That's worth observing in motion.”

Senior Writer

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