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What are some words or usage that became more prominent in 2024, either in your life or in general?
That might be a fun post about some ways in which language took shape in 2024. Any language is allowed, but additional explanation may be warranted for non-English expressions.
Enshittification. I’m not complaining, mind you, it’s a lovely word. A perfect mix of silly and dire, that also draws attention to a very concerning reality of our tech landscape that we didn’t have proper language for previously. I’ve been a fan of Cory Doctorow for ages anyway, I think he’s a modern-day prophet in the wilderness. It does annoy me that the word is already losing its meaning though. I get linguistic evolution over time, I just wish it happened more slowly sometimes.
My feeling is that "enshittification" losing its meaning to generally mean "anything that sucks" is due to Cory coining a word that doesn't really describe the concept very well. What I mean is, if you are a typical English speaker encountering the word and someone isn't there to explain the full concept of a cycle of intentional service degradation in the name of profit, you would very reasonably intuit that the word means something broad about the state of something coming to the state of being shitty, which may include an intentional or indirect cause.
I mean, this is the full definition of the word:
The word "enshittification" can't do nearly enough lifting from its component parts to imply all that. And before he coined it, even a lot of people working directly for or with these enshittified sites didn't naturally understand this cycle before he outlined it--I've talked with people at Google, Facebook, Linkedin, and Amazon and more often than not they don't see the forest for the trees, and genuinely don't think they're deliberately creating a cycle of failure.
I mean, I don't want to gainsay Doctorow, the guy's great, but I think it's a bit of a shame that he used a word like "enshittification", which very much sounds like it should mean the incorrect definition that people are using it for, instead of a more descriptive neologism or phrase.
Behind The Bastards podcast recently subbed in an episode of “better offline” into their feed as a sampler. The episode is called “The Man who Killed Google Search”. He uses “tech rot” instead of “enshittification”.
I like the latter better though, but I’m a huge fan of Doctorow’s too. Been at a couple of events with him and he is every bit as cool as his writing suggests. Sometimes I hope he has a food taster though. The guy is effing fearless in speaking truth. If he disappears I would take it very hard.
Yep, I've listened to that ep and follow Ed Zitron generally and I personally like "tech rot" and his references to "The Rot Economy" better, although I think it still doesn't quite get us there. Not that I have any better ideas myself. :)
Agree about Doctorow, I've met him a couple of times at events over the years and he's very chill. He's probably the best chronicler of what's happening in tech right now that we have, I think--Zitron's definitely up there but Better Offline and his newletter mostly tend to circle back over and over to the same few points, although they're very good points.
So...
planned enshittifuckedirottification?
I wouldn't necessarily say more prominent, but certainly more relevant. Think of how things have been enshittified in recent years:
Google Search is now infested with ads and inaccurate AI-generated blurbs on every search result. Image Search/Google Lens is also nearly as unreliable as Tineye for reverse image searching. It's at the point where Qwant, Bing, even Yandex are better products.
Tumblr imposing a pornographic content ban, watering down search results and disabling the ability to search the archives of blogs flagged as mature.
Imgur removing old and NSFW content, despite it being used prominently in the earlier days of Reddit.
Online dating. Most apps have been bought out by the same two or three parent companies and have been turned into overglorified Tinder clones (POF, Hinge, Okcupid, to name a few). Finding love on these apps is damn near impossible these days, and I actually have a conspiracy theory that Match Group, Bumble Inc, etc. are deliberately obfuscating people's messages and interactions to sucker them into paying a $30/month subscription. And these companies are honestly playing a dangerous game, with the rise of incel related violence.
Reddit hiking API fees and effectively declaring war on third-party apps. And a more recent change to Reddit: them removing the random and randnsfw subreddits.
YouTube's various adpocalypses and guideline changes.
Blizzard Entertainment and Riot Games heavily cutting back on Customer Support staff and using sloppy machine learning algorithms to respond to tickets. Or even Blizzard's sharp decline as a developer.
Mobile gaming. Spend any substantial amount of time playing freemium/ad supported mobile games and you'll realize how low the bar has stooped in terms of what consitutes gameplay and even honest advertising standards.
McDonalds, Subway, KFC, etc hiking prices to the point where even nice restaurants are comparable from a price point perspective.
Streaming platforms hiking fees, rolling out ad-supported plans, removing their own content, etc.
Microsoft Recall. In case you wanted another reason to consider switching to Linux from Windows 11...
I know this isn't the point of your post, but I also want to add Meta. Everything they do is enshittification. You can't just scroll your FB feed for updates on your friends, it's all ads now. Instagram you can't see things people you follow post anymore, it's like 2/3 ads now. Their Moderation is just an AI bot that has certain flag words, and you can't get a real person to help you unless you pay for verification. You can ask for a review sometimes, but even then, the button doesn't actually work. They never remove actually harmful posts, even on threads, but will shadow ban you if you use a nono word like democracy.
Meta is a really good example.
One of my friends had her Facebook account hacked, defaced with crypto scams and then locked. Because she registered for the site on an old university email address she no longer had access to, she couldn't recover it.
She tried and failed to get the attention of an actual human. Her attempts to call them out publicly on Twitter only got the attention of spam bots pulling off account recovery scams. When she tried to go into the comments of one of their Instagram posts and call them out (she still had access to Instagram), immediately removed and account restricted. In the end, she had to make a new Facebook account entirely.
Out of curiosity, can you elaborate on this? I've dipped my toe in a few times over the years, and from the beginning I don't think I've found any mobile freemium game that's felt worth my time. Has it truly gotten worse lately? I'm rather horribly interested to know how.
Happily. We're talking egregiously false and/or inappropriate advertising. Some examples:
Misleading gameplay footage that is nothing like the game itself (usually masquerading as a shitty Clash of Clans clone.) It's rife across the whole industry, but Evony: The King's Return is a very high-profile example which got an Advertising Standards Authority complaint about it upheld. This ruling was made eight months ago. The fact that I have seen this ad numerous times since tells me how utterly toothless the ASA are as a regulatory body. And yes, that's the same Evony which used stolen assets ripped straight from Age of Empires II.
Paying streamers, influencers, actors and models to pretend to play your game or shill your app. Mistplay is a good example of this, also Emiru (now a well-known streamer) used to get paid to do such ads.
Game being played by a complete moron. Another widespread trope where you see (often misleading) footage of the game being played by a buffoon, like those who are the reason shampoo comes with instructions. It's there to infuriate the player into downloading the app and trying to do better themselves.
Interactive game-in-an-ad advertisements which are booby-trapped with as many redirects to the iOS App Store or Google Play Store as possible. Or those which have no gameplay whatsoever, goad you into thinking there's an interactive minigame in their ad and are just like "fuck you, here's a redirect!"
When the 'X' in the top-right is deliberately made too small to tap consistently, or the ad legitimately screws with your ability to close it.
Sexually inappropriate content, which borders on the line of pornography that cuts out right before any nudity. Often scenarios which depict sexual assault.
Borderline Elsagate shit. I don't think I can directly link or even fully describe this example here. There is an infamous stomach-churning ad for a mobile game called Master Doctor 3D involving a disgustingly inappropriate way of treating a female patient's dirty, fungus-ridden foot. I'll leave it at that.
This should be the word of 2024.
Wasn't it already the word of 2023?
(Not that it isn't both)
I second it for another year!
It’s been diluted (enshitified?) to the point it gets used to mean a software product that costs money.
I love the new slang these days. 'Cooked' is good, but ever since taking a social media break 'brainrot' is by far the winner for me.
I like "terminally online", it helps me find other people cooked from brainrot
Cooked has been used for ages to refer to someone who’s brain has been cooked by drugs.
I’ve heard “melted” used similarly, I’m partial to that one.
I agree! The new slang that I've learned this year has been great.
Brainrot is up there for me too.
"We're so back" and "it's so over" anytime any mild event occurs still makes me laugh.
'Peak' and 'mid' mean nothing anymore after getting on Backloggd.
I found out that the kids these days are very unironically calling their friends "chat".
Hearing a real person saying "Ok chat, what do you think about this?" Really caught me off guard.
There's an infamous Tumblr post that's been going around that tries to argue that "chat" has become a 4th person pronoun (much to the bane of those of us who keep making futile attempts to explain that it is neither 4th person or a pronoun).
It is interesting to see how young people have started using it, though -- it seems like one of the modern slang bits that's more likely to stick and become linguistically interesting over time.
I haven't seen the tumblr post but what you've explained in your post makes sense.
I get it, I understand where they are coming from and the entomology is kinda spooky, but I suspect its going to go more and more towards the internet prevailing our speech patterns.
fwiw, entomology is the study of insects. Spooky in a different way than etymology 😅
Holy shit, I've been reading/writing that incorrectly for years. Thanks for correcting me!
No worries, it's an easy mistake to make! I have an ex who wrote a comedy story that partially relied on their similarity for a pun.
Relevant XKCD
If it means we've got a genderless pronoun, I'm all for it.
I see what you did there
Oh just like how streamers do. That's pretty funny. I like that, but it did take me a minute to understand lol
Over using “gift” as a verb is like fingernails on a chalk board to my ears. This may not be 2024-specific, but it’s a pet peeve of mine that has increasingly irritated me in the past few years. Yes, “gift” can correctly be used as a verb. But its overuse, when “give” would be perfectly acceptable, feels to me like parroting of corporate lifestyle marketing campaigns. Unless you’re attempting to conspicuously emphasize that the object you’re bestowing upon another is a gift, please just say that you’re giving it and not gifting it. //end of personal niche rant
Thanks for saying this.
My inspiration for this post came from an advert for socks which stated something along the lines of "this socks are not gonna ghost you". I did not find that very clever but it exemplified something I noticed before, which is that the word "ghosting" no longer refers exclusively to people who disappear completely from someone's life in a way that feels malicious, inconsiderate, or emotionally hostile. Now any kind of removal or disappearance is "ghosting".
If you create a post and don't participate in the discussion, you "ghosted the post".
Another usage that became more prominent in 2024 is a broader meaning for "clickbait". Now, any kind of title or content you dislike is "clickbait". That used to be employed exclusively for intentionally misleading titles containing false claims or false implications.
EDIT: how could I forget? "Performative" comes from philosophy and it is an useful term. It is now a synonym for "fake" and "insincere".
We use performative to describe our child's (and other children's) behavior, as in "performative crying" to get attention vs. crying because they are actually injured. Been using it that way for years, but I haven't heard it used much elsewhere in my bubble.
I mean both are to get attention just in different ways. For me performative are way to close to the meaning of manipulative for me to use for children.
"Performative" reminded me of "virtue signaling". People use it for any kind of political signaling now.
"Performative" is long and allows for sentences that sound whole and authoritative. "For show" would have the same meaning but it doesn't make you nearly as smart. Regrettably, I must say, it is a very useful word to employ when you must say that someone is insincere in a way that doesn't sound like a moral or personal accusation, but it really is. It sounds clinical and analytical but it is nothing of the sort..
At the same time, one might say that "performative" is popular because we live in very insincere times. I have used it myself.
"Deconstruct", "decolonize", "unlearn", and "re-wild" are all terms I read in similar political think pieces that I wish I could ban all usage of.
Also I started counting how often left leaning people on NPR use the phrase "sort of", and it's made my life worse.
Oy. This thread could lead me to overthink.
Depending on my energy level and audience, I might push back on casually broadening the scope of “ghosting”. My choice of not engaging with something doesn’t feel like ghosting.
That said- my “Irish goodbye” (dipping out unannounced, Aka “skating”) at social gatherings I could see as ghosting-adjacent.
I’m also mulling over my own sort of internal newly-developed-possibly-overdeveloped sense of what “trolling” is.
Questions like what is clickbait and how precisely “rage bait” I think connotes something more “trolling-like”.
I’m taking care of some elderly that watch far too much TV news. It, and most of the advertising seems like it’s morphed into some over-optimized form to maximize “trolling”.
Granted, this is my own lens, but after years of ad-free streaming media, something about basic US Cable TV seems worse for mental health than even my arguably troubling instagram reel habit. At least I’ve trained the algo to feed me mostly rescued dog videos and it filters out people being physically injured for comedy… until my sister sends me something cribbed straight out of Idiocracy again, anyway.
Slang or not, I like being a word nerd. Using them well makes for better accuracy in communication and I think can lift people and ideas up.
One last note- an old slang favorite that this very white guy almost never gets to use is the 1990s-era gangster/rap/hip-hop phrase and idea of “coming correct”. I have no idea what song, but the lyric was something like “when you step to me you better come correct”. I just always loved how concisely it encapsulates “Come at the problem fully prepared, with a solid argument/plan, ensure you’re able to win, and follow-though all the way.”
Okay. Enough from me. Nerd-on, friends.
In a world where "raw dogging" is now used to describe flying with no distractions among other things unrelated to sex without condoms... I think you'll lose the battle at stopping the progression of language
However there's not really the assumption of maliciousness that I've seen some ascribe to it.
The new - and improved? - raw dog is one of my favorites. A friend sent me a link to an online raw dog simulator before my last trip, before that I didn’t know it was a thing. Well, in that context.
Lol. Raw Dog. I forgot about that one, and I adore Jamie Loftus (she wrote that book about Hotdogs I have yet to read).
This is interesting. For me, I feel that "clickbait" has always meant "whatever it took to get you to click", whether by falsifying the headline or not. I for sure remember the term being used for Buzzfeed listicles 10+ (or 15+? how the heck long has it been?) years ago, the sort that promised "Number 7 Will Surprise You!" That might have even been my introduction to the term.
My 8 year old niece says "slay" for anything good
I got POV (explanation of scenario) from my 9 year old yesterday.
Spelling ‘lose’ as ‘loose’. It’s been everywhere, but now I’m seeing it used in professional publications, as well, which feels different. Frankly… I hate it, lol — but I’m also a staunch ‘catalogue’, ‘prologue’, ‘epilogue’ proponent, so no surprise that I’d be displeased with changes to spelling anyway.
Also, the word ‘validation’ has pretty much expanded to eclipse about seven other words at this point. ‘Vindication’, ‘commiseration’, ‘corroboration’, ‘support’, ‘approval’, ‘attention’, ‘consideration’ — off the top of my head, but there are definitely more. This word currently has such a broad scope; I’d definitely say this is one of the top five defining words of the year.
Edit: ‘Justification’ is another one. So now we’re up to eight.
E2: ‘Reassurance’ is also on the list. Nine, then.
Aggravates me to no end. I started seeing it quite often in 2023. It's gotten so bad that I often do a double take whenever someone spells it properly before doing a small cheer in my head. Yes, it's so bad that I feel as though I'm more likely to read their intended meaning without stopping when they spell it incorrectly. That's to say nothing of when they actually mean "loose" in it's proper definition.
Maybe we just need games to throw a big "You lose" up on the screen whenever the player meets defeat to get society to spell it correctly again.
I am curious what you are advocating for? No shade (as the kids say), I just wasn't aware of any controversy.
I don't care for catalogue, but aren't prologue and epilogue usually spelled like that, even in American English? Google nGram shows the -ue endings way more common than without. Though there does seem to be a recent dip on the -ue endings.
Weird, I never noticed/thought about the difference.
Catalog specifically says "Sears/Target/Victoria's Secret Catalog" to me.
I tried writing cataloged and it really wants to be catalogued. Though my autocorrect seems to want them without the u. Epilog and prolog seem right out, unless we're talking about the programming language.
I've noticed that the most well-known LLMs have been getting 'verbed' the same way Google has. I hear 'Did you ChatGPT that?' or 'I'll just Claude it' around me regularly now. I think it's interesting how quickly that ended up happening! I'm guilty of it too hah
One of us must be in a weird bubble, then, because I've never heard that in person once.
Data management in Marketing, so to be fair I usually hear the new buzzwords pretty quickly
English has been pretty flexible with that sort of derivation for a long time tbqh, so I'm not all that surprised! I haven't been around people who use those services often enough to experience it myself, but English speakers will verb almost anything.
Skibidi toilet. Hawk Tuah. Gooning.
... just kidding, I hate those. I think I've reached the point where I'm old enough to groan pretty damn hard at current slang / memes.
"Gooning" isn't all that new, though, is it? It has an urban dictionary entry from all the way back in 2005, before the kids saying skibidi were born.
A lot of "new" slang is cribbed from older AAVE. I don't know if this is one of them but it wouldn't be surprising for it to have hit white mainstream much later. Or other media that used it became popular again. But everyone saying "crashed out" now (and I don't know how far that has spread, enough for me to know it) is streets behind for example.
Yesh, this is definitely true! Though I'm not sure whether it's the case for "gooning" either -- it always struck me as sort of a "dude on creepy internet forums" type slang tbqh.
It was Something Awful forum slang but I am pretty sure that's unrelated to the current usage due to age.
Edit: I regret every moment I spent googling and am walking away from the internet now
Actual lol. Thank you. I will now NOT go try and confirm some vague suspicions about some of these words.
Sometimes enough is enough.
Articles about gooning (unrelated to the origin of the word) were a few steps too far off the edge of the internet for me today
I pulled “Skibbity-what?” on some nieces last night just to watch them cringe. One point to the annoying Uncle.
Oh, misusing the slang is something I'm looking forward to so much as an auntie. My stepkid is less aware of Tiktok trends than I am, so it's a waste of time there.
It’s glorious. I’ve made my daughter’s friends cringe so hard it silenced the room and shrank them 2 sizes at the same time. I pretended not to notice and left. The room erupted behind me in indignant teenagers thoroughly vexed. All by casually calling something “cooked” like it had always been that way.
Making college students roll their eyes is fun, but I can't wait for like ... 14 year olds
I thought skibidi toilet was mindless, dumb gen alpha trash.
Then I watched the entire series and genuinely enjoyed it. I can absolutely see why kids like it, and I would have probably been extremely into it if I was 13 also.
The other two, yeah, terrible.
Finally decided to look up what this Hawk Tua thing is about just now. Every time I saw it mentioned, I was having a hard time squaring it with a children’s book by a Native American author I had read this summer. Now I see I misremembered the title/recurring phrase, which is haw ekwa.
https://birchbarkbooks.com/products/lets-go-julie-flett
"Haw êkwa, and skate on that thang..."
Using the term "Cinema" to describe something as a "you had to be there moment ("it was absolute cinema")" or to express surprise or excitement in online streams, mainly in the VTuber community, is something I've noticed is becoming a lot more prevalent. Specifically in Twitch streams, there's now an emote that people in the chat can use that appears to be Scorsese with his hands up that is just called "Cinema".
Seems like a worse, less esoteric (and thus less cool) version of calling the same thing "Kino" via 4chan slang from like 8 years ago.
You know, that makes sense: I wonder if people who didnt want to be associated with 4chan and the negatives that surround it picked up on it and its a derivative of that.
"Ni hao ma? Ni ji sui?" (Mandarin for How are you? How old are you?) has become something I hear a lot in my house now. My oldest officially starts learning Mandarin in school next year, but in his pre school/nursery 3/4 of the kids speak Mandarin at home so he picks up words and phrases.
Not as relevant global slang, but I do see this as a sign that I'm going to start paying more than lip service to learning languages in my free time moving forward. I've had a few embarrassing moments when I thought my son was babbling or using made up words (which he does a lot) and he was speaking another language. The struggles of being a mono lingual person living in a multilingual area where people here speak ~3-4 languages fluently and are conversational in more depending on the person and their social circle.
Not words perse, but there are three now very prevalent language constructs among gen z that I think are the type of thing I would have previously found extremely grating, but as I've gotten older I've just sort of learned to laugh at the goofiness of them and roll with it. They were certainly in usage before, but this year it seems like every single person under the age of 23 uses them. I also always think about how God awful it would be for someone learning English to deal with these:
Examples:
Examples:
Before you ask, yes I am old, and yes, I know a lot of the slang people used when I was 22 was also extremely stupid, and I thought so back then too.
I should have read yours before posting my own!
Dude the wild thing really feels like a... thing! It has entered the parlance of myself and all my friends, and I cannot figure out how. All the other phrases like "it's giving" feels really jarring, but wild feels like it slipped in naturally. I'm not sure what made me notice it first but it's definitely in there now.
I actually call things and situations wild, and have for years, but the more recent usage feels subtly different in a way that it feels like the word is being used in a totally different way.
For instance, I could see myself, in response to someone acting belligerent and drunk at a party "Mike was wild last night", or in response to a car skidding off the road and crashing into sometimes "Woah, that was wild". I could never see myself saying in response to an ad saying some mediocre move is "the cinematic experience of a lifetime", "'the cinematic experience of a lifetime' is wild", for instance. Or in response to seeing someone wearing white socks with dress shoes and a suit "white socks with dress shoes and a suit is wild".
Like, the new usage seems to be extremely specific, and takes the form of either a direct quote followed by "is wild", or an overly long, very specific complex explanation of something followed by "is wild".
It feels less like an organic slang word that is having a popular moment, and more like a very specific construct of a meme, if any of that makes sense.
It sort of feels like this is becoming more of a pattern of language usage that aligns with widespread, regular usage of social media with young people. Instead of slang being passed by word of mouth, music, and tv, and thus being retranslated and constantly changing, thus broading its usage, it's now instead transmitted via extremely particular memes. Because everyone can see the origin of every new piece of slang instantly, they don't morph or broaden in usage as much and thus if you don't use it in its original 'correct' form, you're doing it wrong, out of touch, and uncool.
That's the best theory I can come up with anyway.
"Gaslighting" have a zoomer sister who uses this word to describe every little argument or inconvenience. I don't think she knows what it really means.
"Stochastic Terrorism"
Because it was nowhere and then it was the word of the day on the collective calendar, and people used it for everything
It's a fine phrase and all but everyone pretended they'd known it the whole time. It was weird.
I don't think that is specifically a 2024 thing though. It seems to have been trending since 2015/16, which makes sense given that's when Trump came into the picture. And the first time I heard the term was in association with him and his followers during his first term.
To be fair, I worded the question in a way that allows for some leeway, given that a particular term can spike in ways that are not necessarily possible to measure objectively. For example, a term may have originally spiked in on-line searches in 2022 but was only picked by mainstream media in 2024. Or maybe it only reached a certain group now.
The graph shows it spiked in 2019 and again in 2022
I just felt it was one I keep seeing, your mileage may vary.
Dunkelflaute: A period with little-to-no wind and sun. In such periods most of Europe's electricity price spikes badly. I don't live in Germany or even close to it, but we are all impacted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
Nice word! The last month or so there have been only 2 days where I’ve seen direct sunlight!
Please everyone haven't you noticed also here on the tildes twin epidemics have been raging:
“Literally” has literally meant “figuratively” for a while now though.
And I think putting a question mark at the end of a sentence that isn’t a question is a way of emphasizing to the reader that you’re not quite sure about what you’re saying?
I’m genuinely sorry for responding this way, by the way. 😂
I literally fell in love with this comment
Ah but that's literally been happening since the 1700s.
For the latter, I can't tell if you mean ending a sentence that way in writing? Or if you mean it's an up talk indicator? Or it being the "up talk" outloud?
Re: literally
OK, I guess I'm confused and very much not an authority on daily usage since I'm not living in an English speaking country and English is not my first language. We have an equivalent word to 'literally' in My CoUnTrY and It would look veeeeery stupid if you used it in the same way as 'literally' in amr. English.
Yeah I find this written uptalk distracting and a bit lazy. You could phrase yourself to imply being unsure instead of just slapping a question mark at the end. You begin a reading a sentence that turns out becoming a question and it just feels like ... betrayal???
"The river was literally alive with fish." We know the river wasn't actually alive, so literally is being used to let you know that there were really. so. very. many. fish. Those are some intensifiers too. It's just an adverb being used to emphasize the other words.
It is (as a rule) clear when "literally" is being used as an intensifier instead of being meant, well, literally because it's obviously not true that the river was alive.
If I say, "I'm literally dying rn 😂" I'm definitely not dying, I'm just laughing really hard. If I say "I have cancer, I'm literally dying right now" - I'm almost certainly telling you to plan my funeral.
The word has been used that way, and people have complained about it, for centuries! So we're probably not stopping now.
So you know how in English there are words up top of a sentence that can tell you it's a question but also sometimes tone does it too? That's what the ? Is doing there. I do know French can do this too. "You are having some tea" and "Are you having some tea" can both be the same sentence, depending on the punctuation. If I'm over-explaining, I apologize, just trying for thorough.
Even when it isn't truly a question it's indicating a questioning or yes, uncertain tone. There isn't always a way to indicate that in text without unwanted words. And generally an answer is being sought. With rhetorical questions you don't always drop a question mark because you don't want an answer.
I don't really think there's anything lazy about it. Usually it's people who don't use punctuation that are accused of being lazy. Does your primary language use leading punctuation? Maybe you're just feeling a quirk about it Sometimes questions surprise you. More tone indicators are always ok with me.
There is criticism, particularly of women, for using uptalk. It's often perceived as insecure and weak and it's one of those really annoying things where without it, I'll get called a bitch, so you can't win.
Omnicause: a derogatory reference to the concept of all politics being tightly interlinked, with the implication that said linkage isn’t as important as it is portrayed.
I find that it is useful as the connection between some movements is often tenuous (e.g., Palestinian nationalism and climate change), and tightly linking all movements together risks alienating supporters of one movement but not another. It also creates mission creep and can make the activism less effective at implementing change.
I for one could do without hearing "chef's kiss" ever again!
Weird. It was a great word, but during the Time of Strife (i.e., late October) it went from used, to overused, to ubiquitous, to meaningless in the span of 48 hours. I agree with the original sentiment of the way it was being used, but man... I think "weird" was used more than "the" was leading up to Stupor Tuesday.
I actually think that the Harris campaign abandoned “weird” way too quickly. The early weeks of the campaign had so much momentum and I think “weird” was a big part of that. Finally, someone was saying it! We’ve all been saying it for years, of course, but to me it was refreshing to hear a politician say it. And it was clearly making thr GOP squirm and play defense, going on every Sunday show to say “nuh uh, you’re the weird one!” But then there was a shift in tone after the DNC. Walz was muzzled and completely disappeared from the campaign when he should have been on every podcast he could just shooting the shit about sports or hunting, and how fucking weird those other guys were. That’s how I was introduced to him, before he was selected, and he rocketed from obscurity to the top of my list for who I wanted as VP. And then they started hanging with Liz Cheney anfter the DNC and stopped calling them weird and that’s when I knew it was over. The wind was out of the sails, the campaign dead in the water.
It's not so much the campaign, but everybody seemed to jump on the bandwagon, and it diluted the effect so much. "I got fries at Wendy's, it was so weird."
Not sure if you think it really was 48 hours, but it was legitimately weeks.
It lasted for weeks, but it took only two days for it to wear out its welcome.
‘brat’ was Collin’s word of the year… but without brat winter, i’m just not feeling it.
Maybe this is one that has just been in my little slice of the world but Wild seems to have taken off like a rocket. It's used in sentences like "Oh, wow, that's wild" as a reference to things that are surprising or cool. I know it's always been an option, but it feels like locally it's become a catch all. Things like "That's crazy" or "that's nuts", have all fallen by the wayside. I'm having a hard time figuring out when it became so prevalent, but it definitely has.
Avoiding stigmatizing language around mental health, but also just the slang evolving. I agree, it's wild.