Analysis: Are you a brat already manifesting your goals for 2025 or are you still suffering from brain rot as the year draws to a close?
The Words of the Year selected to-date for 2024 are a real mix of the upbeat and downbeat, prompting many to ask, where do they come from and who actually uses them? In fact, who is responsible for selecting them? Let's put on our linguistic hats to examine neologisms, new words and expressions or the application of new meanings to existing words.
For the latter, we only have to look at brat being selected as Collin's WOTY for 2024. For many of us, the definition of this word is connected with a young child who is misbehaving. However, it is now characterised as representing an independent and hedonistic attitude, stemming from the success of singer Charli XCX's Brat album and in fact, her going viral on social media living her best brat life.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Brendan O'Connor O'Show, how did brat become the word of the year?
While our use of language is infinitely creative, linguistics falls under the realm of social sciences and as such, we have defined processes that help us explain language use. These word formation processes include coinage, where commercial trade names have evolved into general usage.
We’re all familiar with hoover but, if we think of the technology on our phones, we no longer text but rather we WhatsApp and snap, depending on our preferred app. We constantly borrow across languages. Our love of food confirms this, we breakfast on croissants and dine on pizza and pasta. Doppelgänger rated highly on Merriam-Webster’s WOTY 2023. Of German origin, it translates to a living person closely resembling another and rose in popularity in 2023 due to media coverage of multiple lookalike crimes
We practise compounding, joining two words together to make a new word. Doomscrolling was a strong contender on recent WOTY lists due to it’s increased usage when clicking through the torrent of negative news coverage in recent years. Keeping with the technology theme, we’re instafabulous, blending Instagram and fabulous together to create a new word.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Brendan O'Connor Show, Irish Times columnist Finn McRedmond and broadcaster James Patrice on the latest new words added to Dictionary.com
Well-known people are often subject to blending. The recent US elections have re-opened the debates around Trumpenomics. If we’re not blending, then we’re clipping through shortening words. Rizz was the Oxford WOTY for 2023 and is generally acknowledged as being a shortened version of charisma, having a universal sense of style and charm that attracts others. It’s hard to believe that it is 13 years since selfie, as another example of clipping, assumed Oxford’s WOTY crown. In fact, acronyms, with our focus on WOTY, also fall under the list of word formation processes.
Having revealed the word smithing processes which underpin the annual WOTY lists, let's move on to look at what are some of the sociological triggers for these words. Linguists acknowledge the influence of youth speech in bringing forth neologisms. Our teenagers are at the forefront of new language usage as they develop their linguistic identity and their sense of belonging at a time when so much is changing for them. In this century, this has tied in with them being digital natives through their propensity to consume and socialise through online technology.
It is therefore no surprise that many of the recent WOTY have stemmed from the online world that we all now inhabit. Oxford's WOTY 2024 is brain rot, another nice example of compounding. It's ascribed meaning is that we reduce our mental capabilities through excessive online consumption of inferior or trivial content. Demure has been selected as Dictionary.com’s WOTY 2024 due to it being part of a phrase very demure, very mindful that went global in 2024 thanks to influencer Jools Lebron's TikTok videos.
Our youngest members of the population are now titled Generation Alpha. They have been born since 2010 so they traditionally largely fall outside the age range to which linguists ascribe major language variation. However, is this now changing and could future WOTY be driven by an even younger cohort? This generation has been born into an age of social media and online gaming. Perhaps it's not accidental that the American Dialect Society's WOTY 2010 was app.
The academic research on Gen. Alpha is still in its infancy but articles and blogs abound with their neologisms from skibidi to what the sigma, so well portrayed by Jimmy from Mammy Banter. Thankfully, for this more mature linguist, the use of these expressions has been confirmed by her 9 year old nephew (thanks Max!).
Meet Jimmy from Mammy Banter
It isn't just our young people that are driving new language usage. The Covid-19 pandemic led to a whole new vocabulary being adopted globally. Cambridge’s WOTY 2020 was quarantine, while Oxford couldn’t decide on just one word and issued a complete report of WOTY 2020, calling it an unprecedented year. Word formation processes abounded from clipping of Corona virus to rona, primarily in Australia and the US, compounding with mask-shaming and lockdown to blending with infodemic for information and pandemic. Acronyms such as PPE entered the vernacular and bubbles took on a whole new meaning.
So, who is responsible for selecting the WOTY each year and how do they go about it? There are assigned lexicographers, but they don’t work in isolation. Many of the dictionary providers start their WOTY selection process by analysing which words have been searched online most frequently during the year.
They also consult massive databases of language known as corpora, the Oxford Monitor Corpus of English being one of these. These dynamic databases are continually updated with automatic feeds from online media. In the case of the Oxford corpus, this amounts to 150 million new words per month. Automated corpus search tools, such as Sketch Engine, then allow the WOTY teams to easily identify frequently used words for that particular year.
From CNN, what are the NewsNight panelists' words of the year?
While a shortlist of finalists is then drawn up, it is often up to the general public to vote for their final choice. In the case of the aforementioned brain rot as selected by Oxford, it tallied more than 37,000 votes before being duly elected - a final count any of our politicians would be delighted with! While it holds true that we won’t use all of the WOTY in our everyday conversations, the thorough selection process ensures that each year, the words selected can be considered to be of cultural significance.
The last WOTY I would like to mention is the Cambridge WOTY 2024 which has been revealed as manifest, meaning to visualise your goals to help you achieve them. It has considerably increased in usage this year due to Olympians and celebrities widely discussing how the process of manifesting helped them succeed. However, this word has been in existence for over 600 years, taking on many meanings from seeing something clearly to a ship’s list of goods and passengers. It is the true essence of language evolving over time. In the words of renowned linguist Suzie Dent, our role as linguists merely serves to "chart the journeys of words whose lifetimes will far exceed our own".
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
