Ten words of the week

From "algothracy" to "Donroe Doctrine" to "violence worker community," what a year this month has been.

I’ve spotted too many notable coinages to limit myself to a single WotW this week. Here are ten new or newly newsworthy lexical items that I’ve been tracking.

Algothracy

Government by algorithm, aka clicktatorship. The coinage was suggested by Bluesky posters, many of them anonymous, in response to a query posed on January 4 by Don Moynihan: “I am trying to find the right term for the idea that governing decisions are disproportionately shaped by perceptions based from online bubbles, or aimed to please an imagined online audience.” “Algothracy” was one of the responses that made it into Moynihan’s January 7 Substack post, “Life under a clicktatorship”; another was “LOLviathon.” “[W]hat we are witnessing from the Trump administration is not just skillful manipulation of social media—it’s something more profoundly worrying,” Moynihan wrote. “Today, we live in a clicktatorship, ruled by a LOLviathan. Our algothracy is governed by poster brains.” Algocracy, a less-clunky alternative to algothracy, had been proposed as early as 2016.

AWFUL

A derogatory acronym for Affluent White Female Urban Liberal, coined by right-wing “influencers” after the point-blank murder of American citizen Renée Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent. (New York Times gift link) An AM radio host and home-loan officer in Florida, improbably named Pierce Outlaw, called AWFULs “the scourge of polite society.” Appears in Wiktionary as AWFL, with the alternative “leftist” substituting for “liberal.” In The New Republic, Molly Jong-Fast wrote that she first saw the acronym on election night, November 5, 2024, “when internet commentator Erick Erickson tweeted: ‘Affluent White Female Urban Liberals. The AWFULs radicalized a lot of people against them. Nichole Wallace, Rachael Maddow, and most of the rest of the women at MSNBC really have played a powerful role in what is happening tonight’ (misspellings of Nicolle and Rachel: Erickson’s, not mine).”

Bangification

The use of AI to perpetrate “nonconsensual deepfake abuse.” Coined from bang (= to copulate) and the ever-popular -ification suffix by Nina Jankowicz in an October 2025 post, “The Bangification of AI.”

Donroe Doctrine

An updating of “Monroe Doctrine”: the U.S. foreign policy, first articulated by President James Monroe in 1823, that purports to establish U.S. claims over the entire Western Hemisphere. After the January 3 capture by U.S. military forces of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump renamed the policy after himself. “American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he boasted.¹ The Economist called it “the Donroe Delusion”: “Unless coercion is balanced by attraction, Mr Trump’s hemispheric doctrine will eventually fail and, in doing so, weaken the United States.”

“The Donroe Delusion,” January 8, 2026.

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Friction-maxxing

I wrote about looks-maxxing a couple of weeks ago in a post about mogging. Now meet friction-maxxing, defined by The Cut columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton as “the process of building up tolerance for ‘inconvenience’ (which is usually not inconvenience at all but just the vagaries of being a person living with other people in spaces that are impossible to completely control) — and then reaching even toward enjoyment.” Pack your bags for the friction-maxxing journey, because everything is a journey.

ICEstapo

A blend of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency created in 2002) and Gestapo (an acronym for Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police, an organization created by Hermann Wilhelm Göring in 1933 that was “responsible for widespread atrocities” during the Nazi era). ICEstapo was in use as early as April 2025 and has been increasingly widespread as ICE agents become more visible and aggressive, especially in Minnesota. From an Urban Dictionary entry dated January 9, 2026: ICEstapo is “used to describe ICE as an authoritarian secret police force or paramilitary agency akin to the Gestapo.”

“ICESTAPO TACTICS MUST END.” Sign in St. Paul, Minnesota. John Locher/AP via Mother Jones.

Jetway Jesus

“They Get Wheeled on Flights and Miraculously Walk Off. Praise ‘Jetway Jesus’” reads the A-hed in the December 18, 2025, edition of the Wall Street Journal (free link). The so-called “miracle flights” are causing boarding delays and wheelchair shortages. I found a July 10, 2018, “Jetway Jesus” citation on WheelchairTravel.org: “In a long-running joke among airline flight crews and frequent flyers, Jetway Jesus is said to ‘heal’ passengers who request wheelchair assistance at their point of departure but abandon it on arrival. Such airline passengers are accused of faking a disability to enjoy the privileges of preboarding and preferential treatment at TSA security checkpoints.”

Middle power

“A state that is not a superpower or a great power, but still exerts influence and plays a significant role in international relations” (Wikipedia). Contemporary examples include Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Sweden, Israel, Pakistan, and Canada. The concept originated with the 16th-century Italian diplomat and poet Giovanni Botero; it was in the news this month after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a “stark speech” (NY Times) at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in which he warned: “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” He received a rare standing ovation.

Violence worker community

I’ve been following novel community-building for more than a decade. (See my July 2010 post about the apathy community, the pervert community, the carrion-eating community, and more.) The latest addition to my list comes from Defector editor David J. Roth, for whom violence worker community refers in particular to the masked agents of U.S. border patrol and immigration enforcement.

Roth began using the term during Trump I; a July 22, 2020, New Republic article of his deplored “the unaccountable dregs of the Violence Worker community.” “Violence worker,” minus the community, goes back at least to a 2002 book by Martha K. Higgins, Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities.

Wine mom

A variation on AWFUL (see above). Fox News commentator David Marcus pointed with alarm to the wine-mom community in a January 11 opinion piece: “What we are seeing across the country as organized gangs of wine moms use Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is not civil disobedience. It isn’t even protest. It’s just crime.”² He’d prefer to see some “stoic dignity,” s’il vous plaît. A Wikipedia entry for wine mom traces the back to 2018, when a Washington Post column detailed “the wine-mom trope” as “a full-blown, marketed lifestyle, evangelizing alcohol as a culturally acceptable respite from the everyday stresses of motherhood.” Usage surged during the bored afternoons of the Covid pandemic. Lately, wine moms have gained defenders (Virginia Heffernan: “The Wine Moms Are Enraged”) and inspired satirists (McSweeney's: “Wine Mom Gang Meeting Notes”).

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Other recent words of the week:

Mogging, fawn, Cloud Dancer, Kewpie.

My words of the year for 2025.

1. Update, January 29: The New York Post appears to have been the first to use “Donroe Doctrine,” in a January 8 front-page headline.

2. Capitalizing “antifa,” which stands for “antifascist,” makes it appear as though there’s an organized movement with membership cards, marching orders, and a payroll instead of the reality: a loose affiliation of local activists. This false notion undergirds the Trump White House’s September 2025 designation of “Antifa” as “a domestic terrorist organization.”