Third Edition: ‘Word of the Year’ – Dictionaries battle for relevance

There is a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Carl Sandberg, Languages, which speaks of the ever-morphing nature of words: “Words surround your tongue today / And break into the shape of thoughts / Speaking between your teeth and lips / Now and today / Will fade into hieroglyphics …” Perhaps, it is the struggle of remembering against forgetting that brings about the annual. Every dictionary worth its salt is full of “words of the year.” Or, perhaps, it’s more of an existential crisis: How does social media stay relevant in a visual culture that is the arbiter of taste, except by taking cues from it? The annual tradition of selecting a “Word of the Year,” which began in the early 2000s, is, therefore, both a commemoration of the immediate past year and a battle for relevance.

Take, for example, the words that make the cut this year. From Oxford Dictionaries’ choice of “brain rot” to Australian Dictionaries Macquarie’s Word of the Year, Cambridge Dictionary’s “manifest” or Dictionary.com’s “demure”, they all reflect concerns, anxieties and aspirations. of the digital age. The first recorded use of the term “brain rot” was apparently in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in 1854, 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,” an obscure mantra for the Digital Affirmation Club that reinforces, one reel at a time, the power of self-actualization.