Word Play: The ever-changing lexicon

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, February 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Wordsmith George Grant now with Word Play. This month, considering our ever-changing language.

GEORGE GRANT: According to linguist Nick Nicholas, the structure of the English language has remained relatively stable. Even as the ubiquity of social media and instant messaging has prompted the rapid adoption of newly coined vernacular, neologisms, loan words, and slang.. He says: “Extending vocabulary by means of native derivational morphology is not evidence of a language system changing. It is evidence of a language system working.”

Nevertheless, the seemingly ceaseless changes in vocabulary can be more than a little disconcerting. Our daily discourse is now awash with freshly minted fad words like boujee, rizz, bussin, situationship, fosheezy, and bruh.

In an effort to help us navigate the newest frontiers in language, every year editors of online dictionaries attempt to sort through all these changes. Then, they pick the most significant and defining words of the previous year. Using factors like searches on their websites, online polling, and data from page hits, they identify words that reflect developments in popular English usage as it is shaped by current events and social trends. They try to highlight expressions that particularly reveal the ethos, mood, fashions, or fads of the preceding year.

In the past, words like refudiate, locavore, emoji, vape, goblin-mode, omnishamble, sportswashing, lawfare, vibeshift, metaverse, and splooting have been named word of the year by one or another of the dictionaries.

This year the Oxford English Dictionary editors passed over romantasy, lore, taytay, and slop, to settle on brain-rot. It is defined as the “deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

Merriam-Webster’s editors considered demur, fortnight, allision, and pander but selected polarization as their word of the year. It is defined as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.”

The editors at Collins English Dictionary chose brat over delulu, looksmaxxing, anti-tourism, and rawdogging. Brat, taken from the synthpop music of Charli XCX, is defined as “a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude or aesthetic.”

I must admit that at least few of these neologisms are interesting and fun. But it is probably best to heed the wise counsel of William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well. He said, “Beware of all the slippery new fad words. They rarely endure.”

Ah yes. Reality check.

I’m George Grant

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