As the year slouches towards its wintry extinction, a seasonal question recurs: what are the hottest new words? Yes, it is the big dictionaries’ regular symposium of lexical additions and words-of-the-year lists – which, like any lists, are powerfully clickbaity provocation machines, efficiently generating widespread ridicule both for what they contain and for what they leave out. The claims that such lists tell us something profound about how we live now may be dubious, but they certainly provoke an amusing mixture of disgust at linguistic change and gurning acceptance of any shiny new nonsense.
Each dictionary takes a slightly different approach to its nominations. Collins, for example, goes for spikes in frequency of use. Its word of the year is “binge-watch”, which has been around for many years but has been three times as popular in 2015 as in 2014, since everyone has been slumped in front of Netflix since January. Among the runners-up are “Dadbod” (an insult, surely, to buff fathers) and “clean eating”, which means “following a diet that contains only natural foods, and is low in sugar, salt, and fat”. In other words, a diet that is low in food.
By contrast, dictionary.com opens wide its maw to the snazziest recent coinages, having recently announced the addition of “yaaas” (a fun way to type “yes”), “feels” (feelings), and the splendid “fleek”, often used in the phrase “on fleek”, which means “flawlessly styled, groomed etc”. I want to start an etymological myth that “fleek” arose when someone mistook an old-fashioned long “s” for an “f” when poring over a Renaissance text and seeing the word “sleek”, but it probably won’t work.
The reliably hype-hungry Oxford Dictionaries trumped all these pedantic verbals by nominating as their word of the year an emoji character, admirably untroubled by the fact that it is not a word. It is a picture, or at best a pictogram, and when translated it is, on Oxford’s account, five words: “face with tears of joy”. This controversial choice probably had nothing at all to do with the fact that Oxford had “partnered” in a study with SwiftKey, makers of an emoji-enabled smartphone keyboard app.
At least the rest of Oxford’s words of the year were actually words, including “on fleek” again and also “lumbersexual”. (The two are presumably quite compatible if one’s beard and check shirt are excellent.) Oxford’s are usually the most thoughtful lists, considering political and cultural trends, and here its shortlist subtly makes a point by including “refugee” but not “migrant”, though refugee is the older noun by about a century. Oxford thus shows where it stands on the rhetorical divide between those who describe people moving from Syria into Europe as travellers who want something from us (“migrants”) and those who emphasise that they are fleeing something horrible (“refugees”).
One may hope for similar reasons that the current popularity of the word “mastermind” in news reports to describe the alleged coordinator of the Paris attacks will not last long enough to make it on to future lists. Since the 17th century, a “master-mind” was someone of extraordinary intellect. And even a criminal mastermind, like Moriarty or Blofeld, is someone we are expected to admire for his dastardly ingenuity. It is not very ingenious to shoot people in cafes. What’s more, as the eminent US commentator Jack Shafer points out, “by casting terrorists as masterminds, we overestimate them, and this overestimation boosts their reputations, inadvertently increasing their global status and recruiting power”. (Note to reporters: “ringleader” is not much better; this is not a circus.)
Noting such nuances, of course, is the kind of service that good dictionaries can provide. And even their faintly silly rankings of the best new words can offer a diverting snapshot of irrepressible linguistic innovation. But what you think the word of the year is might in the end depend on personal experience. One individual’s life in 2015 might best be summed up by the word “lugubrious”, and another’s by “flange”. Or, in the spirit of Oxford Dictionaries’ masterful piece of trolling, we might sympathetically concede that someone’s year is most accurately described by the hauntingly eloquent emoji of a smiling turd.
