Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and it is Word of the Year time.
I'm so excited.
It's my favorite time of year.
And I have Jess Safaris and Danny Heber.
Jess is from the Words Unraveled YouTube channel and Danny is from the Linguistic Discovery YouTube channel.
Welcome, both of you.
Thank you so much for having me back on the show.
This is my favorite time of year.
It's great to be here.
Thank you.
Danny, yeah, first timer.
We're so excited to have you.
And Danny, you made a spirited defense of six, seven recently.
So I would love to start with you and that word of the year from dictionary.com.
Sure.
Yeah.
As you might expect, a lot of people.
I joked that both the Oxford word of the year and the dictionarycom word of the year were rage bait, because Oxford's word of the year was rage bait.
And a lot of people felt rage baited by six, seven as the word of the year.
And I think, yeah, there's a lot of reasons I saw come up why people were upset about it.
They were like, it's not even a word.
It's multiple words.
It's like numbers rather than words.
It's multiple words.
It's a phrase, not a word.
The most common one I saw was that it's going to be gone in a minute.
You know, like it's a flash in the pan and no one will ever say it again.
So it started as kind of a long reply on Threads.
And I was like, no, this would be an interesting newsletter issue.
So I put that out and kind of explained some of those issues with it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the words of the year, they often are like flash.
There are always some flash in the pan.
I was looking at the words from last year to remind myself.
And brat was one of the words of the year.
And I don't think I've heard that since.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Slang is kind of like biological species.
Like most of the biological species on the planet have gone extinct and will go extinct.
You know, there's a very small percentage of words that actually make it through.
Like.
If you're into etymology, which we all are here, then you know that, like from any given word proto-Indo-European root, there's often like dozens, or sometimes you know a lot of words that derive from a single root.
And it makes it seem like these ancient languages had very few words, but that's not the case.
It's just that very few words actually survived.
And so we're getting this like sliver, this slice of those words.
And same with slang.
You know there's one out of every hundred new slang words, or something is going to survive, and
You know, get legs, as it were.
Yeah.
I mean, the words of the year, they always break down into sort of two types, too.
There's the trendy words that, like came out of nowhere this year, that suddenly you're hearing everywhere.
And then there's the words with like gravitas that are, you know, relevant to the current like societal goings on and seem very important.
Right.
We always have both of those kind of words.
I thought it was really interesting.
Actually, we are recording this on December 12th, on Friday, December 12th.
And I saw just this morning the Austrian German youth word of the year was also 6-7.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, apparently it's big in Austria, too.
And I assume in English, not in German, right?
It was six, seven, not like six, seven.
Right.
Yeah.
They're saying it with the English.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah.
That's not too surprising, because that's part of when you have cultural uptake of a phrase or something like that.
The context in which you hear it is important, and the context includes which language you're hearing it in.
So yeah, it just wouldn't have the same kind of cultural meaning if you said it in German or Spanish, probably.
It's not about the numbers at all.
No, but I did hear math teachers are incorporating 6-7 into their problem sets to get students more excited about math.
My niece and nephews tell me that we have already moved past the era of trendiness on 6-7, because the adults got a hold of it.
So it's just not cool anymore.
Good to know.
I heard there's a hand, a gesture that goes with it.
I won't bother learning it now.
Thanks.
The little tidbit I just learned about that yesterday the way people are using emojis to make that gesture online.
They're doing the hand up and the hand down emoji.
Yeah.
And those two emojis were actually proposed by linguist Lauren Gaughan from the Lingthusiasm podcast.
And they were approved by the Unicode Consortium precisely because they were so versatile on being used as gestures.
So it's kind of come full circle, like back to linguists and six, seven.
Oh, that's great.
Lauren's been a guest on the show, too, talking about gestures.
It was a wonderful episode, I think, in this last year in 2025.
Cool.
Yeah.
And speaking of, like the English words, going into foreign countries, the German youth word of the word was das crazy, which also had the English version of the word.
And I think that there was a German word, too, that related to AI.
Right, Jess?
That's right.
It was basically AI era in English, which I think is is how you would say that.
But it's the same thing as our phrase AI era.
And that one was selected by the Society for the German Language, which was announced on Friday.
And the same notion is just that we have this also, like this AI boom.
Another term that has come up a lot in German, so I'm told, is KI boom, which is AI boom.
So here we have yet another what they call Denglish word, which is this like pseudo anglicized English or German terms.
Yeah.
And no surprise, there are a lot of AI terms in the words of the year.
I think the word you chose for PR Daily was slop.
It was the only choice.
And I selected this months ago.
I write their word of the year article every year.
And I was disappointed that The Economist went with the one I did.
But it was the only one that made sense, because this is for communicators, people who work in PR, people who work in comms.
And And slop is the thing that they're up to their knees in right now.
It is everywhere.
And it's a problem, too, because it creates PR issues.
It creates challenges.
It also just makes your voice sound inauthentic and uninteresting.
And readers can increasingly pick up on it.
So one of the things that I run into a lot when I write, when I ghostwrite for ad agency executives, is they tend to want to come up with an executive quote on the fly.
So sometimes their comms person will AI generate them a quote to be like.
We really like this campaign, but it reads like a robot every time.
And I'm like, could you could you just tell me what you think about it?
And I can write that down.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it was the Macquarie Dictionary in Australia also chose AI slop.
And yeah, a couple of months ago someone asked me what I thought the word should be and I thought slop too.
One of the things that I love about slop, not slop itself, but the word, is that it's so productive.
So I've been doing word watches all year on AI, and you have slop-erators.
Those are people who publish slop.
There are, let's see, slopaganda.
Slopaganda, yes.
That's a good one.
Yeah, AI-generated propaganda is slopaganda.
Slopographers are people who make AI-generated images.
Oh, and slopportunists are people who are taking advantage of slop.
But then there is sloptimism.
So the feeling that respected outlets will get more attention, more trust, because they don't produce slop.
So we have sloptimism.
No, I think that's probably true.
Has it crossed the part of speech boundary yet too?
Is it being verbified yet?
Oh, that's a great question.
I imagine people are saying slopping, but I haven't heard it.
I actually haven't heard that.
I haven't heard that one, so I can confirm.
I do think this one will stick around.
I think this word will continue to be relevant much in the same way that spam has remained relevant.
Yeah, it fits and it's useful.
Another AI word was vibe coding.
That was the Collins Dictionary in the UK.
Yeah, vibe coding is a slang term that was popularized by one of the OpenAI founders.
And it describes how AI tools allow hobbyists to build websites and create blogs and command websites programming and coding capabilities through conversation.
So it's coding by feeling, much to the chagrin of traditional coders.
So you can say something like make a blog and it will yield that rather than you doing the work yourself.
Yeah.
Have either of you tried vibe coding?
I do some programming and I've always used some of the AI-assisted tools, but I've not done anything.
That's total vibe coding.
It's more just like, help me rewrite this formula, or function, rather.
I have asked an AI tool to give me formatted HTML before to paste into a WordPress site.
Yeah.
Many years ago, I made an iOS game called Grammar Pop.
You can't get it anymore.
But I put a description of it into Lovable one of the vibe coding apps and it made a working demo in like five minutes.
And it had taken me four months to make a demo at that level.
And I just I sat and stared out the window for a long, long time.
And then I, you know, it wouldn't be anything you could release.
Like, I'm sure it had bugs and, you know, I would never release that to the world.
But if you're making a prototype, I was like wow, that's amazing and scary and depressing and just wild.
Do we have any other AI related words?
Oh, the Chinese, a Chinese dictionary.
Their most searched term was deep seek, which is probably the most famous Chinese AI model.
That certainly makes sense.
It is interesting how to your point earlier, we almost have three categories this year, and that's AI and internet words, but AI-specific words, and then we have power structure words and then we have chronically online words.
What are some fun power structure words this year?
Oh, I like the ones from the Canadian English dictionary.
You know, Canada is obviously very unhappy with the United States right now.
And so we have elbows up was the runners up after the Canadian tariffs were put on.
The people in Canada started using elbows up as a way to talk about fighting back.
That is a hockey.
So it's so Canadian.
Yeah.
I noticed also maple washing, which I thought was really fun, which is kind of like presenting this sort of false vision or kind of narrative of a Canadian identity.
But I also saw some people using that as representing products as being Canadian made, even when they aren't.
So you might put like a maple leaf on it to make it seem like oh, this is made in Canada, but in fact isn't.
And so people have been more aware and irritated by that when they're seeing it.
That parallels greenwashing.
Yeah, exactly.
Yes, right.
Yeah.
Is that rage bait?
Which, I mean, rage bait is also a spinoff of clickbait, too.
So we've got multiple layers here.
Yeah.
The thing I like about rage bait that the editor pointed out is that because we have a word for it, it shows that people are recognizing it more.
So it's not people aren't being tricked by rage bait anymore.
They're naming it and saying, oh, this is just intended to make me angry.
This is rage bait as opposed to maybe.
Maybe sometimes they can say that instead of just getting angry.
Now that we've got clickbait and ragebait and I know there are a couple other cases of like context, I've seen that it wouldn't surprise me if that bait eventually became what was called like a libfix, where it gets like reanalyzed as like a suffix that can then be productively applied to new words with its own meaning.
That would be fun.
That would be a good, like, prediction of future words of the year is, like, a suffix meaning bait.
If I ran a bookstore, I would totally have page bait all over the bookstore.
Like, here's some page bait for you.
Cool.
Nice.
Maybe that's a word for like low quality fiction.
Yeah, it's like gate, like water gate.
Every scandal is now a gate.
Yeah, lib fix.
Well, are we fatigued by AI and rage bait?
That's the Glassdoor word of the year.
That's a job and recruiting site.
I feel that in my bones.
And I'm sure that's very relevant to Glassdoor too just because the job hunting process is so exhausting these days because of AI.
Yeah.
Affordability was another one of the words, but a lot of the people on their site that was one of the runners up.
You can really feel the anxiety here.
Yeah.
Japan has a different kind of anxiety.
This just came out this morning.
Their kanji of the year is bear.
Because, like for the animal, because there's been an increase in bear attacks.
My goodness.
Do you know why there has been an increase in bear attacks?
No, I read the article, but there was no additional information about why the bears are suddenly so angry.
Maybe there's bear rage bait.
Wait, no, that was actually a thing.
What was it?
Bear baiting was like a terrible blood sport from bygone eras.
Oh, yeah.
So goodness gracious.
Oh, well, let's see another foreign one.
Oh, The Economist said the clear winner for foreign word of the year was and I'm not going to know how to pronounce this
I'd say Nijuan, N-E-I-J-U-A-N.
And Mandarin for involution.
What I loved about this is it's become a term used by workers to refer to the sense of running ever faster on a treadmill to get nowhere.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I did a show about hamster wheel versus rat race.
So it's like China is having the same the same feelings.
Yeah.
And then that term works so well on English, too.
Like I could see that being adopted into English and picking up frequency here, too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What was another recently?
Lie flat.
That was another work related word from Asia.
What was the meaning on that one?
On lie flat?
Mm hmm.
Oh, that is like significance.
I think if I remember right, it's like resisting work.
So it came out of the feeling of overwork and instead there's like lie flat and not work.
I did a poll on the Grammar Girl Facebook page.
We have some winners there.
So the one that got the most votes was liminal.
That was from Nguyen Tham.
She described it as a word for that threshold moment, the space between two versions of yourself.
No longer the old you, but not yet the new.
I swear to God that Bo Burnham is responsible for popularizing this term in younger circles, because his Socko sketch used it significantly.
And then I swear to God, TikTok got a hold of it.
And then Reddit got a hold of it more.
Reddit was already playing around in that space because there was already a liminal spaces subreddit.
But TikTok didn't seem to know the word liminal until after Bo Burnham.
Oh, that's great, because I was wondering where it came from.
It seemed like an odd winner to me.
And it's grown in popularity since then.
There are a couple of Bo Burnham-isms from his inside.
What was it?
It's not a sketch.
It's a performance piece that he created during the pandemic.
I like it because it's one of the most hopeful of the words on our list.
Perfect.
Though it's dark in context.
The notion is he has this sock puppet named Socko, who expresses anxiety about the state of the world and says that he lives in a state of a liminal space between life and death, which is like a permanent space of sleep, paralysis.
Darn it.
I was hoping it was hopeful.
Another one.
Some of the people made videos to go with their submissions, and the sycophants video by Susan Autry was particularly good.
What I loved about it is that she was reading the definition of sycophants from the dictionary and then she grabbed another dictionary and said always get more than one source.
The origin of that word is really fun.
I'm sure it won't be a surprise to either of you, but it means it's related to the word for fig and it relates to throwing the fig, a gesture that was used in Greece and Rome for usually to describe poorly behaved people who are supporters of popular political figures.
And if you were throwing the fig, you were an unpleasant type of this sort of person.
But that also is quite relevant today, right?
Yeah.
It's just people being badly behaved sycophants for popular figures.
And then the final one was, again, affordability from Cindy Stochen Huckman.
And that's become even in the past.
What is it like a week or so?
Suddenly that word is all over the news now too.
So I think it's been more frequent and more relevant for most of the year.
And all of a sudden in the past two weeks, it's blown up even more.
Yeah.
People buying Christmas groceries and fainting at their receipts.
Right, right.
Well, and then there's the controversy about the cost of Walmart's Thanksgiving feast this year and whatnot.
How it was like cheaper, but it was different items.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's like the whole holidays has really like intensified the attention to it.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Let's see.
And now, you know, we were recording this a little early.
It's funny because, you know, we always complain that the words of the year come out so early.
And so I scheduled this early and now Merriam-Webster hasn't come out with their word yet.
So...
We'll have that to look forward to.
We can't tell you what it is.
Maybe it'll be out by the time this runs.
And then in January we always have the American Dialect Society Words of the Year, which is always just a really fun list.
So those are upcoming.
Have either of you gotten to attend the ADS selection process for that?
Not in person.
When they allowed live streaming during the pandemic, I always went because it's really fun.
Yeah, no, it is great fun.
And it's very much just based on vibes.
It is not a scientific process whatsoever, but it's, you know, a bunch of linguists that kind of just sit in a room and throw out ideas and vote on what they think.
Words are representative.
And I think it doesn't.
You know, there's a lot of back and forth about whether, like oh, should it represent, like cultural trends.
Should it represent something that's actually like linguistically significant, like a grammatical shift or something?
And I think everyone's got different opinions and that's what makes it fun.
You just get to kind of choose from among all of the ones that people find interesting.
Yeah, it was really fun to listen in and hear how chaotic it was and everything.
And then as the perspective, because then Ben Zimmer does this amazing job.
We're going out to talk to the media about the words and it makes them sound, I don't know, much more not important but like deliberative, than maybe it is.
Yeah, like the weight of authority of the American Dialect Society.
And you know, to be fair, everyone there is linguists and we're all very attentive to the language around us.
We're being observant about it and whatnot.
But it's not.
We're not like using corpus linguistics like Merriam-Webster dictionarycom is you know?
I'd love to go some year.
Well, I thought to wrap up, we could talk about we could go through the 2024 words of the year.
And we can think like, have any of them are any of them still relevant?
Or you know how do we feel about maybe what the one we, the one we would carry over from last year into this year?
So we had brain rot, demure brat, which we mentioned, manifest polarization, kakistocracy and shitification, aura and vibes.
It is interesting.
We've gone from kakistocracy to one of them this year was anotherocracy.
What was it?
Pathocracy.
Pathocracy.
That's right.
But meaning like with pathos being the main notion there.
So ruled by people who are pathological.
So from corrupt to pathological.
Yes, indeed.
This one, that word actually dates back to the 1950s.
One of the there was a Polish psychiatrist who. who popularized that term and studied it in detail.
And it's interesting because, according to his research, the transition to pathocracy happens when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure.
And some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and the irresponsibility of them and their followers.
But then they also appear to some psychologically normal individuals who find this person charismatic.
Which is interesting.
Yeah, the examples he gave were the Third Reich, apartheid, and slavery.
Yeah, we missed that one.
That was a good word.
We also missed.
I jumped forward too fast.
We missed parasocial, which is actually another from Cambridge Dictionary.
And one that I think all three of us have probably experienced to some degree.
Yes.
Yeah, apparently.
Yeah, with each other.
Exactly.
I know.
So the dictionary saw a surge in people looking up the word after the YouTube star iShowSpeed blocked an obsessive fan as his number one parasocial.
But this has an AI twist, too.
So when I first heard parasocial, I thought that that doesn't feel like a new word to me.
Like I was talking about that back in 2015, 2016.
But apparently now also applies to the idea of AI companions.
So some people are describing the relationships people have with those AI bots as parasocial relationships.
And that's one of the reasons it's increased in use.
There's an interesting subreddit called I believe it's My Boyfriend is AI and people genuinely having relationships with their chatbot friends.
The interesting part of that, too, is there was an update that erased some of those personalities.
And those people went through serious psychological challenges as a result of that, which was that it was just really interesting to observe.
Yeah, that's been growing.
It is really interesting to see what happens with that.
One thing I kind of like about cases like parasocial is that that's a word that's been around for like a decade now, at least in popular discourse, as Internet and social media has created more of what we label as parasocial relationships.
But I love cases where the same word's been around for a while but it's shifted in its meaning and its use.
So if I had been attentive to word of the year back in like 2005 2006, when Facebook became publicly available, I probably would have chosen to friend as a verb right.
Because prior to that, you said either befriend is the verb or friend is a noun.
There was no friend as a verb.
And now it has like a... you know, specific use in the context of social media.
So I like cases like that, where it's a word that has shifted its function over time, whether it be like grammatical function or its meaning.
And so parasocial is kind of another use of that.
When I first saw it, I was surprised, like, that word's been around forever.
You know, why does that?
And then I looked into it and I was like, oh, I see.
So it's actually kind of shifting its use again.
It's being used for AI more.
So it is relevant in a whole new way again.
Yeah.
And it's a different degree of separation, right?
The para element of it being a different degree of separation than the one between fans and public figures.
Right, right.
Well, I imagine we will all be on our various channels talking about the Merriam-Webster word of the year and the American dialect sincerity words of the year and any other interesting ones that pop up in the next few weeks.
So where can people find you?
Well, I'm on YouTube in another podcast called Words Unraveled, which is etymology focused, with my friend and co-host Rob Watts.
And then you can find me on TikTok at Jessifaris and in bookstores.
Yay.
What book is out now?
Useless Etymology is my most recent one, and it is also my favorite one that I have written.
Oh, nice.
I liked it, too.
It's my favorite of yours, too.
Thank you.
And Danny, where can people find you?
I am Linguistic Discovery on all the social media platforms.
And I also run a newsletter at linguisticdiscovery.com or on Substack.
And so that should be picking up steam a little more this year.
So tune into that.
Give that a follow if you want to get more on like the science and diversity of linguistics.
It's very good.
Yeah, I love your channel.
Thanks, Jess.
Yeah.
I appreciate that.
Yeah.
So, well, thank you for being here.
Have a great holiday season.
And we're going to for the Grammarpalusians, we're going to have book recommendations as a bonus episode.
So stay tuned for that if you are one of our supporters and we appreciate very much.
