Words of the year: Fritinancy edition
How we talked — and wrote, and complained — in 2023.
Note: This post may be too long for your email inbox. To read the full post, hop over to the browser version or use the Substack app.
It’s been a banner year for artificial intelligence, at least in the lexicography universe. Authorities around the globe have selected AI-related terms as their words of the year (WotY): Cambridge Dictionary picked hallucinate (and so did Dictionary.com); the Economist chose ChatGPT (and so did Shanghai Daily and the (US) Association of National Advertisers); the Moscow Times chose the Russian equivalent — ИИ — of AI. For the record, I wrote about the AI sense of hallucination in February, and AI was on my 2022 WotY list. (Too soon?)
I have AI-adjacent words on my own list this year, but I’ve also selected words from the realms of culture, fashion, the economy, and slang. As in the past, I’m following the American Dialect Society’s selection criteria: words (or “lexical items”— a prefix, a suffix, a couple of phrases, and an acronym appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2023. By the way, the American Dialect Society will announce its own words of the year in early January; you can still submit your nominations here and see past years’ lists, going back to 1990, here.
This is my fifteenth WotY roundup. You can find links to all of my past lists at the very bottom of this post.
Things in general
Sweary? Yep. I call ’em like I see ’em..
Enshittification. It’s rare that we can trace a new word to a single source — in this case the journalist and author Cory Doctorow — and that the new word is a) so perfectly apt for such a wide range of phenomena and experiences, and b) so widely accepted and disseminated. Doctorow invented enshittification in late 2022 to describe what was happening with TikTok, and later expanded it to encompass the whole “enshitternet.” The word caught on almost immediately and began to be applied to the digital economy in general, to public libraries, and to, well, all things. It also engendered the useful verb enshittify. If I had to pick a single WotY, this would be it. Read my February post for the Strong Language blog about enshittification.
Assholocene. Technically speaking, the era we’re living in is the Holocene, a word coined in 1897 from Greek words meaning “entirely new.” But thanks to enshittification you could also call it something bleaker, as Kyle Chayka reported in a “2023 in Review” essay for the New Yorker. What new label could we apply to “our chaotic historical moment”? Chayka’s suggestions include “the Terrible Twenties, the Long 2016, the Age of Emergency, Cold War II, the Omnishambles, the Great Burning, and”—my favorite—“the Assholocene.” I don’t often give thumbs-up to a portmanteau, but this one is a pretty great blend. The earliest citation I’ve found is from a June 25, 2023, Urban Dictionary entry: “the current period of human history in which people in power tend to be assholes.” See also: Pandemicene.
Culture
Mini-room. I’d heard of writers’ rooms, but until this year’s Writers Guild of America strike I hadn’t heard of mini-rooms, which were a major point of contention during the May-through-September work stoppage. Also known as development rooms, mini-rooms bring together a few writers before the beginning of a TV project, with no guarantee of the show going into production. That leaves the door open for exploitation. “Not only are newer writers less likely to get staffed in a mini room,” Variety reported in March, “but even if they do, they will only make scale. In the WGA’s view, this has led to an overall depression of writer pay rates as mini rooms become more common.”
Climate
Hurriquake. The novel portmanteau was coined in August when Tropical Storm Hilary and a 5.1 earthquake hit Southern California at approximately the same time. “Who pissed off Mother Nature?” a grocery-store manager in Ojai, which bore the brunt of both events, told a Los Angeles Times reporter. “A hurricane and an earthquake — what are the odds?”
Fashion
Quiet luxury (aka stealth wealth). “No flash, no logos, but big-time style” is how the AP summed up this year’s dominant fashion trend. It was exemplified by the outfits worn by Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow during her March trial, in Utah, for a 2016 ski-slope incident (she won) and by the wardrobe of actor Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy in the final season of “Succession”: neutral colors, luxurious fabrics, minimal (but expensive) accessories. The buzz went beyond the predictable fashion and celebrity publications: Fast Company called quiet luxury “the key to a sustainable, long-lasting business.”
Social media
Skeet. Bluesky, the still-in-beta social-media platform, launched in February 2023 for iOS users and in April for Android users. Its founders, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, want us to call Bluesky posts “skeets,” in imitation of Twitter’s “tweets.” (Sky + tweet, get it?) Over on the Strong Language blog, James Harbeck looked into the history of the word skeet, which includes some senses that are, as James puts it, “giving people the ick.”
The economy
The -cessions. “The Perk-Cession Is Under Way at Some Companies,” the Wall Street Journal announced in March. By the time I wrote about perk-cession in May, the trend had spread: companies across the country were cutting back on job perquisites such as the free snacks, gyms, and laundry (and more) that employees had been trained to expect. The rich-cession — a “correction,” or price-hike, in the luxury-goods market accompanied by layoffs of well-paid employees — followed a few months later: “Bad news for trust-fund brats and credit card companies is good news for everyone else,” was the gleeful headline on a December 11 story by Timothy Noah in The New Republic. (These aren’t the first -cession coinages: I included mancession in my 2009 WotY list.)
Greedflation. One explanation for rising prices: blame greedy CEOs. “Greedflation” is the title of a November 2023 report from the office of U.S. Senator Bob Casey Jr. (D-PA). I wrote about greedflation in November.
Politics
Indict. Once, twice, three times, four times. The Former Guy is in a heap of legal trouble, which bothers his scofflaw followers not a bit. Meanwhile, why do we pronounce indict that way?
Technology
Techno-optimism. “We are told to be miserable about the future,” wrote billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreesen in his October 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Just say nay: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” Andreesen was here to “bring the good news” in a series of single-sentence paragraphs. “Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.” Not so fast, responded tech critic
and other skeptics. In a December 11 post, “The Religion of Techno-Optimism,” Marx wrote: “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto is an extension of a wider effort by the Silicon Valley elite to convince the public that they deserve the power and wealth they gained during the industry’s boom. They’ve revived eugenics to argue they’re intellectually superior, but that isn’t enough. They know that their positions are in jeopardy if the public starts to question whether they can ever deliver on their promises, so they’re drawing a hard line: you’re either with us or you’re against us. And if you’re against us, that will have consequences.”Prompt. An old word with a new artificial-intelligence sense, prompt has come to mean “a string of words that instruct an AI in an action.” When I wrote about prompt in January, job listings for “prompt engineers” — with hefty salaries — were just beginning to pop up. By April, Time magazine was heralding prompt engineering as “The AI Job That Pays Up to $335K—and You Don't Need a Computer Engineering Background.” See also promptography, photograph-like artifacts generated by artificial intelligence.
Acronym
MOOP. Thanks to heavy rains, Burning Man 2023 was kind of a shitshow (literally). Accounts of the volunteer cleanup efforts introduced many of us non-Burners to the acronym MOOP, which stands for “matter out of place” — anything “not originally of the land on which our event takes place,” according to the Burning Man website, which contains a comprehensive glossary of Burner-speak. (A “sparklepony” is a “derogatory term for a participant who fails to embrace the principle of radical self-reliance, and is overly reliant on the resources of friends, campmates, and the community at large to enable their Burning Man experience.”)
Prefix of the year
Un-. It isn’t new, of course; we’ve had has had un- words like unwise and unholy since Old English. But we’re going through an Orwellian un- surge at the moment1, with novel coinages popping up in titles, brand names, and algospeak (like unalive as a replacement for death-related terms). I’m working on a full post about the un- trend, but for now I’ll just drop a few names: Unjected (“a place to meet like-minded unvaccinated people”), Unwoke (the title of Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s latest book, published in November 2023),
, , and (three Substack newsletters from different authors), UnXeptable (a grassroots movement for a democratic Israel), and UnHerd (a British news site that aims to “push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places”). What accounts for the un- trend? Maybe we prefer to identify as what we aren’t rather than define what we are.Suffix of the year
-pilled. Since I published a post about the ubiquitous -pilled prefix in mid-November, I’ve found even more examples of its creative use to signify “influenced by.” Here, for example, is Tom Gara on Threads: “HelloFresh is teaching me to cook like a midwestern mom, it’s all ground beef and southwest seasoning with cream cheese. Today it’s a turkey pot pie with the top made of biscuit dough. It looks amazing, I’m based and Wisconsinpilled.” Here’s billionaire VC-slash-techno-optimist-slash-libertarian Marc Andreesen on Former Twitter: “Are you Heinlein-pilled?” And here’s rail-transit advocate Hayden Clarkin on NBC News, commenting on a $6 billion federal grant for high-speed rail: “I’m just trying to train-pill people.”
Bay Area
A couple of nominations for my local followers:
Doom loop. Is San Francisco stuck in one? Read my May 15 post.
Bipping. A cute word for an act of vandalism: smashing car windows and pillaging the car’s contents. Read my September 11 post.
Slang
Delulu. A shortening of delusional, “especially used to describe superfans or dating partners who display odd or extreme behavior” (Dictionary.com). It originated as long ago as 2013 in the Korean pop (K-pop) community, and by the summer of 2023 made sufficient inroads into U.S. slang to merit serious coverage by the New York Times, Today, and Mashable.
Sprinkle sprinkle. It’s “the phrase that’s taking over your TikTok feed,” gushed Distractify in May. The expression has been credited to a YouTube star, SheRaSeven, who explained: “It’s just something I made up a long time ago on this channel so, it’s just like saying ‘Okay, bless your heart’. You know, ‘back at you’. Whatever y’all needed it to mean.”
Girlie. When I wrote about girl in September, I mentioned that the enthusiasm for girl had “reinvigorated” the variation girlie, “a diminutive of girl that’s sometimes an endearment and sometimes, because of that diminutive suffix, an insult.” Since then I’ve been seeing a lot more of girlie, especially as a self-descriptor, and I’m willing to give it the edge in the Girl Stakes. For example, watch fashion “influencer” Jennifer Wang in the video below: “It has palladium hardware which I’m a fan of because I’m a silver girlie.”2 In the past, girly (spelled with a Y) was exclusively a modifier (“in a girlish manner”), and girlie described magazines containing photos of naked women. The current girlie variation is something else: a playful way to refer to oneself or to female adults in general.
Bonus: At :33, hear Jennifer Wang say “sprinkle sprinkle.”
My previous WotY lists:
2022 (AI, quiet quitting, long Covid, and more)
2021 (boosted, insurrection, shacket, and more)
2020 (Before Time, doomscrolling, pandemic, and more)
2019 (hamberder, OK boomer, squad, and more)
2018 (shithole, white caller crime, tender age shelter, and more)
2017 (reckoning, pussyhat, #MeToo, and more)
2016 (bigly, deplorables, woke, and more)
2015 (refugee, Mx., ghosting, and more)
2014 (Ebola, precariat, budtender, and more)
2013 (Obamacare, binge-watching, selfie, and more)
2012 (fiscal cliff, stockist, unskew, and more)
2011 (Arab spring, curate, planking, and more)
2010 (cannabiz, hashtag, vuvuzela, and more)
2009 (app, death panel, zombie, and more)
Speaking of Orwell and un- words, I’m currently reading Julia, Sandra Newman’s “retelling of George Orwell’s 1984.” Newman builds on Orwell’s Newspeak vocabulary with coinages like unbirth (an abortion or miscarriage), uncomradeful, and unfearwise.
Wang calls her Hermès Picotin 22 an “entry-level bag,” which may surprise some of you unaccustomed to thinking of a $5,250 handbag as a bargain. Rich-cession?
"assholocene" might be my favorite on this list, since it really does capture something essential in our everyday lives. (Although the full eruption/florescence of this era is often associated with TFG, there were The Big Fat Liar and also Gingrich in the 90s to warm things up, so to speak.)
I didn't maintain a list this year, but I might have put "FAFO" on it, this having been a year in which many people FO'd after having previously FA'd.