The Third edit: ‘Phrase of the 12 months’ — dictionaries struggle for relevance

There’s a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Carl Sandburg, Languages, that speaks of the ever-morphing nature of phrases: “Phrases wrapped spherical your tongue at the moment/ And damaged to form of thought/ Between your tooth and lips talking/ Now and at the moment/ Shall be light hieroglyphics…” Maybe, it’s this wrestle of reminiscence in opposition to forgetting that brings on the annual glut of “phrases of the 12 months” by each dictionary value its salt. Or, maybe, it’s a extra existential disaster: In a visible tradition the place social media is the arbiter of style, how does one keep related besides by taking cues from it? The annual custom of choosing a “Phrase of the 12 months” that started within the early 2000s, due to this fact, is each a commemoration of the zeitgeist of the 12 months close to previous and a struggle for relevance.

Take, as an illustration, the phrases that made the lower this 12 months. From “mind rot” that was Oxford Dictionary’s chosen one to “enshittification” that made it to Australian dictionary Macquarie’s phrase of the 12 months, to Cambridge dictionary’s “manifest” or Dictionary.com’s “demure”, all of them mirror the issues, anxieties and aspirations of the digital age. The primary recorded use of the phrase “mind rot” was apparently in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, however what might be extra consultant of the mind-numbing ennui produced by the compulsive overconsumption of social media in modern occasions? Ditto for “manifest”, a ditsy mantra for the digital affirmation membership that reinforces, one reel at a time, the facility of self-actualisation.

If tech undergirded this 12 months’s choice, clues to different issues of the time got here from the additionally rans. Oxford’s shortlist is consultant on this regard: In a war-fraught world, the fact of “dynamic pricing” and the escape of “romantasy” each made its presence felt. However, if there’s one dictionary that would declare stake to a phrase universally validated this 12 months, it needs to be Merriam-Webster. For a 12 months that noticed over 70 nationwide elections world wide, many bitterly contested and extremely divisive, their choice sums all of it up: “Polarisation”.