The annual tradition of selecting a “Word of the Year” that began in the early 2000s, therefore, is both a commemoration of the zeitgeist of the year near past and a fight for relevance.
Dec 12, 2024 07:35 IST First published on: Dec 12, 2024 at 07:35 IST
There is a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer Carl Sandburg, Languages, that speaks of the ever-morphing nature of words: “Words wrapped round your tongue today/ And broken to shape of thought/ Between your teeth and lips speaking/ Now and today/ Shall be faded hieroglyphics…” Perhaps, it is this struggle of memory against forgetting that brings on the annual glut of “words of the year” by every dictionary worth its salt. Or, perhaps, it is a more existential crisis: In a visual culture where social media is the arbiter of taste, how does one stay relevant except by taking cues from it? The annual tradition of selecting a “Word of the Year” that began in the early 2000s, therefore, is both a commemoration of the zeitgeist of the year near past and a fight for relevance.
Take, for instance, the words that made the cut this year. From “brain rot” that was Oxford Dictionary’s chosen one to “enshittification” that made it to Australian dictionary Macquarie’s word of the year, to Cambridge dictionary’s “manifest” or Dictionary.com’s “demure”, they all reflect the concerns, anxieties and aspirations of the digital age. The first recorded use of the word “brain rot” was apparently in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, but what could be more representative of the mind-numbing ennui produced by the compulsive overconsumption of social media in contemporary times? Ditto for “manifest”, a ditsy mantra for the digital affirmation club that reinforces, one reel at a time, the power of self-actualisation.
If tech undergirded this year’s selection, clues to other concerns of the time came from the also rans. Oxford’s shortlist is representative in this regard: In a war-fraught world, the reality of “dynamic pricing” and the escape of “romantasy” both made its presence felt. But, if there’s one dictionary that could claim stake to a word universally validated this year, it has to be Merriam-Webster. For a year that saw over 70 national elections around the world, many bitterly contested and highly divisive, their selection sums it all up: “Polarisation”.
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