Columnists of the world rejoice. It’s word-of-the-year time. Our breed just loves to get half a page out of “flark” or “zip-weasel” or “spondify”. No such writer is too young to fake ignorance at what youths are, according to the world’s dictionaries, slinging at one another on imagined street corners. This year the opinion writers are all aflutter with “rizz”. This one really does sound made up. It has the flavour of a joke played on a new boy who arrives halfway through term and proves a bit too boastful about his old school. “Tell him we all say ‘rizz’ when we mean ‘mickey’. Let’s see him make a tit of himself.”
It seems that, unless Oxford University Press is punking me, the word is, in fact, yet another multipurpose slang positive. The Oxford English Dictionary publisher defines “rizz” as “style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner”. Tom Holland, the most recent Spider-Man, looks to have been incidental in spreading it about. “I have no rizz whatsoever. I have limited rizz,” he said, somewhat implausibly.
The announcement featured some genuinely interesting stuff on the rareness of shortened words being taken from the middle of the formal longer version. It is believed the current syllable comes from the belly of “charisma”. Other examples include “fridge”, from “refrigerator”, and “flu”, from “influenza”. So there you are.
All this appears to confirm a shift in Oxford’s strategy. In the past decade or so it has plucked its words of the year from less obscure corners. We have had “climate emergency”, “vape”, selfie and – stretching boundaries – the crying-laughing emoji. Not until 2022 did the publisher go with something genuinely head-scratching. Many of us are still struggling with the proper meaning of “goblin mode”. It had a bit to do with wearing a onesie alone while smoking fags and drinking supermarket vodka.
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Anyway, the question is whether this means anything. With the continuing credit crunch (Oxford, 2008) that is so hurting the squeezed middle (2011) amid the ongoing omnishambles (2012), should we really be bovvered (2006)? Does the word of the year really signal a new star in the linguistic heavens or does it just speak of a desperation to find new ways of generating content?
Simples (2009)! Well, not quite that, Mr Meerkat. But it cannot be denied that that they (we) are eating it up. Like so many apparently established habits, the word-of-the-year announcement is of surprisingly recent invention. Oxford’s first winner was not “gadzooks” or “doodlebug” or even “Gameboy”. It was “chav”, in 2004. It seems the first organisation of any consequence to get on board was the American Dialect Society, in 1990. I can’t say I recognised “bushlips” – a reference to George W Bush’s “read my lips ... no new taxes” speech – but they followed up strongly with “mother of all ...” “Not!” and “information superhighway”. Indeed, the American Dialect Society deserves some real praise here. The nods to the Iraq War, Wayne’s World and early internet summon up the early 1990s more effectively than dancing to Soundgarden with Tori Spelling.
Merriam-Webster set off with (what now?) “democracy” in 2003. Collins took some time catching up with “geek” in 2013. And now here we are. Each year a squabbling mass of words seeking primacy spreads confusingly across the media. Away from Oxford’s engagement with hipster insecurities, the 2023 lexigraphic consensus appears to be leaning into the challenges of artificial intelligence. Not that this is obvious on first glance. Merriam-Webster went with the hoary old “authentic”. Cambridge chose the familiar “hallucinate”. Dig into the accompanying text and you discover the words are there to represent, respectively, the alternative to AI and its most vigorous consequence. Keep away from the tech and you will be at home to the authentic. Embrace it and you will soon be among tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
All of which feels more like an attempt to produce micro-editorials on a current phenomenon than an attempt to locate a word that properly defines an era. Collins came closer to that by picking “AI” itself, but, again, that is more of a headline stub than a tendril of living language. If the “word of the year” is ever worthwhile it is as a sharp Proustian transportation device. See it again and, without having to ponder how it was used, you find yourself propelled back to the relevant year. Consider previous suggestions, such as “me too” (Macquarie, 2018) or “chad” (American Dialect Society, 2000). So much of those years’ discourse is encapsulated in three syllables. It helps that neither was much on tongues to that point.
Can you see where I’m going with this? Did nobody pick “Barbenheimer”? Have they all gone insane? It was right there, word geeks: 2023 in the one portmanteau.