111: Words of the Week of the Year 2024 (live with Mignon Fogarty and friends)

It’s our Words of the Year episode, where we do a vibe check on all the words and name one of them our Because Language Word of the Year. We’re joined by Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty and a lot of friends and supporters. It’s going to be weird. It’s going to be brat. You know we’re going to eat that.

Timestamps

Cold open: 0:00
Intros: 0:54
All the words from everywhere: 10:58
Related or Not: 43:28
Words from Mignon and James: 58:50
Our Words of the Week of the Year: 1:13:23
The Reads: 1:33:40
Outtakes: 1:39:29

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Daniel has a sudden realisation: "WE can have a brat summer!" This is from our latest episode with @grammargirl.bsky.social Mignon Fogarty and all the patrons in chat. So much fun! https://becauselanguage.com/111-words-of-the-week-of-the-year-2024/

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Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.

This time we are ordering the name by how uncommon the letters are.
The most common letter is E, so if your name were all E’s, you would have the lowest score. All Z’s — you would come first.
If we were doing this in English.
But we’re not! We’re using letter frequency stats for Finnish!
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Daniel is here
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Manú
Rene
Ayesha
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Mignon is here
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Whitney
Aldo
Ben is here
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Felicity
Andy
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Kristofer
gramaryen
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Termy
sæ̃m
Tadhg
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Jack
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Andy from Logophilius
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Rodger
Chris W
Wolfdog

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Show notes

Collins: brat

The Collins Word of the Year 2024 Is…BRAT
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/woty

Charli XCX’s coined term named Word of the Year in 2024
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/showbiz/charli-xcxs-coined-term-named-30271518

bratting | Urban Dictionary
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bratting

Brad Summer T-Shirt | Australian Greens
https://shop.greens.org.au/products/brad-summer-t-shirt

Australian National Dictionary Centre: Colesworth

2024 Word of the Year
https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/andc/news/2024-word-year

Cambridge: manifest

Celebrities make ‘manifest’ appear as 2024 word of the year
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/20/celebrities-make-manifest-appear-as-2024-word-of-the-year

‘Manifest’: Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c774mzyrp84o

Macquarie: enshittification

Word of the Year 2024
https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2024/

Dictionary.com: demure

‘Demure’ is Dictionary.com’s word of the year. If that’s news to you, here’s the backstory
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/26/nx-s1-5206433/demure-word-of-the-year-jools-lebron

The Economist: kakistocracy

The Economist’s word of the year for 2024
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/29/the-economists-word-of-the-year-for-2024

Oxford University Press: brain rot

Oxford’s Word of the Year Is ‘Brain Rot’
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/arts/brain-rot-oxford-word.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Writer Thoreau warned of brain rot in 1854. Now it’s the Oxford Word of 2024
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/02/nx-s1-5213682/writer-thoreau-warned-of-brain-rot-in-1854-now-its-the-oxford-word-of-2024

Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/09/brain-rot-word-of-the-year-reality-internet-cognitive-function

If You Pass This Brain Rot Quiz, Your Brain Is 1000% Cooked
https://www.buzzfeed.com/sarathompson1/brain-rot-quiz

Japan: Fute hodo

An Inappropriate Winner? Japan’s Word of the Year for 2024
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/c03840/

Oglaf: Morning Breath (Sleeping Beauty comic)
https://www.oglaf.com/morning-breath/

I say Derby, you say Darby …
https://glossophilia.org/2015/05/i-say-derby-you-say-darby/

Grammar Girl: 765 – Say No to Marshall Law. How ‘Vaccine’ Is Related to ‘Cow.’
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/559-grammar-girl-quick-and-dir-28288066/episode/765-say-no-to-marshall-60557263/

Google’s upcoming Maps feature will let you check out the ‘vibe’ of a neighborhood
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/28/googles-maps-upcoming-feature-check-out-vibe-neighborhoods/

Torment Nexus | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
— Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman) November 8, 2021

Word of the week: Brunchlord | Fritinancy
https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/word-of-the-week-brunchlord

‘The Messenger’ Implosion Once Again Shows The Real Problem With U.S. Journalism Is Shitty Management By Visionless, Fail-Upward Brunchlords
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/02/the-messenger-implosion-once-again-shows-the-real-problem-with-u-s-journalism-is-shitty-management-by-visionless-fail-upward-brunchlords/

Chef Reactions: Jarlick | Tiktok
https://www.tiktok.com/discover/chef-reactions-jarlick

We Found the Best Minced Garlic in a Jar (a.k.a. Jarlic)
https://sporked.com/article/best-jarred-garlic/

What Is Marry Me Chicken?
https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-is-marry-me-chicken/

this seems to bother quite a few people but the answer is that i’m just yapping and i don’t feel the need to add punctuation or capitalization when it isn’t necessary for meaning

[image or embed]

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 14, 2024 at 6:55 AM

From yap to pookie, 2024’s most viral internet slang defined
https://mashable.com/article/gen-z-internet-slang-defined-2024

The BL Word of the Week of the Year

10. forever chemicals
Chemicals that get into our bodies, build up, and don’t decompose

9. brat
Having a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude. As described by pop star Charli XCX, “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things some times.”
See also: brat summer

7. weird
Used by Minnesota governor Tim Walz to describe conservatives.

7. serving cunt
Being confident, sassy or fierce; having an aggressively cool and bold outfit or attitude. From drag culture since at least 2011

6. wankpanzer
A pointlessly large and overpowered 4×4 vehicle, in particular a Tesla Cybertruck

2. rawdogging
Taking a flight without indulging in entertainment or distraction
Originally, having sex without a condom
Expanded use: Engaging in an activity without using customary precaution

2. demure
Restrained in appearance and demeanour. Part of a catchphrase used by lifestyle and beauty influencer Jools Lebron: “very demure, very mindful.”

2. third spaces
Locations that encourage public relaxation, and facilitate social interaction besides the people you live or work with

2. AI slop
Low-quality content (textual or graphic) made by generative AI technology

1. sanewashing
Said of the media, when it makes bizarre or dislocated public pronouncements seem normal and coherent

Panzer Tanks | Types, Roles & Influence
https://study.com/academy/lesson/wwii-german-panzer-tank-facts-overview.html

[$$] Sharon Henderson Taylor: Terms for Low Intelligence
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3087798

Transcript

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

DANIEL: Hello to everyone who’s here. Thank you for coming, and thank you for your support. We would love for you to put messages in chat because we turn those into speech balloons on the video, and it’s fun to watch the conversation unfold as a kind of running commentary.

BEN: A purely Ben-Ainslie-based request — and points to Magistra Annie for already ticking this box — any animals that you choose to display during the video, I personally will really enjoy. That’s all.

MIGNON: Same. Yes.

DANIEL: Very much.

BEN: Oh, [SNUGGLY ONOMATOPOEIA NOISES]

[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]

DANIEL: Hello and welcome to this very special end-of-year Words-of-the-Year, patron-filled episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley; let’s meet the team. First up, he’s a teaching person who’s in touch with the youth. It’s Ben Ainslie.

BEN: Really factually inaccurate. Almost deceptively so, Daniel. The more I teach, the more I realise I have very few conceptual hand and footholds on young people culture. There’s so much Gen Z humor, breaks my brain in ways that are not fun or comfortable.

DANIEL: I am so sorry to hear that. But would you say that you have heard your students use the kinds of words that we might be talking about in today’s episode?

BEN: Look, all I can say to you is if it’s been appropriated from the Black community, the privileged white students that I teach almost certainly are using those words, yes.

DANIEL: Okay. Very good. And that is the pattern. White girls copying gay men copying Black girls.

BEN: [LAUGHS] Very weird ouroboros, isn’t it?

DANIEL: I saw that on a T-shirt once. Also, we do not have a linguist, Hedvig Skirgård, because she is very tired and she is in a bad time zone for this episode.

BEN: 3am is an appropriate time to be very tired, to be fair.

DANIEL: Indeed. Indeed. But we do have a very special guest. She’s the founder of the Quick and Dirty Tips Network. She’s an inductee in the Podcasting Hall of Fame and is known across the globe… around the globe? across the globe as Grammar Girl. It’s Mignon Fogarty. Hey, Mignon.

MIGNON FOGARTY: Hello. Hello. Happy to be here.

DANIEL: Great to see you. Tell us what you’ve been doing lately.

MIGNON: Oh, man, I’m doing my show. I’ve actually been doing two episodes a week for a lot of this year. Yeah, we added interviews, so I’m doing the regular scripted show on Tuesdays and then interviews almost every Thursday, which has been new and fun, and I love talking to people.

DANIEL: So, what’s got you going lately? Can you tell us some of your guests? Can you drop the names?

MIGNON: Oh, man. I always blank out when put on the spot. So great, recent guest, Natalie Schilling, a forensic linguist, talked about cases she’s worked on. So, like true crime linguistics, that’s been super fun. Well, not fun because people were murdered or disappearing, but like hearing about it is fun, solving the puzzles.

DANIEL: I always find true crime just a weird genre because it’s like…

MIGNON: Yeah.

DANIEL: …here’s my murdered body. And it’s like, “Well, we’ve got a really weird cold old case here. Let’s go to our sponsor.”

MIGNON: I know. I was saying it’s so cool, and then I’m like, it’s not cool people died, but interesting. I had Jennifer Lynn Barnes, who’s a mega bestselling author of The Inheritance Game series. And it turns out she is a psychology professor who studied the psychology of fiction and then used everything she learned to write these novels that just took off like mad. And so, she talked about everything she knows about what makes us tick in the way that makes us love certain types of fiction and what makes fandoms work. And it was absolutely fascinating.

DANIEL: I’ve often thought about that in the context of bands. There are bands that I like. I have a lot of Gomez albums, but I’m not a Gomez fan. And then, there are bands that I’m like, “This is me.” So, what makes someone make that jump? It’s so interesting.

MIGNON: It’s super interesting. Yeah, there are elements, like if there’s… I’m trying to remember. It’s been a while. If there are like things you can wear, like if there’s badge or a piece of jewelry or something that’s in the story that then the fans can wear, that can create a sense of connection, for example. Actually, if you can have like a great party based on the book with costumes or food or something like that, it helps nurture the fandom, things like that. It was super interesting. I had Anne Lamott on. She talked about her new book, which is about quotes about love. But, yeah, she’s great. Really fun, interesting.

DANIEL: That sounds fascinating.

MIGNON: I’ll tell you a little behind the scenes thing. When I had her on, we were doing the talk before the interview started, and her son set it up. I think her son listens to my podcast, and he was like, “Oh, you should really go on this podcast.” And she sits down, and she said, “Does anyone listen to this podcast?”

BEN: Yikes.

MIGNON: I’m like, “…yes?”

BEN: “Some people do.”

DANIEL: I think that’s a valid question that we have to keep asking ourselves.

[LAUGHTER]

MIGNON: She was like, okay, she doesn’t, like, mince words, and that’s what makes her well known. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Yeah. Well, thank you for being here with us. For this show, we are counting down everyone’s Words of the Year. Dictionary makers, word lovers, but also from Mignon and some of our listeners. We’re also going to be counting down our Words of the Week of the Year, because some time ago, I shoveled all of our Words of the Week onto our socials and let people vote. We’re going to be counting them down.

You might be listening to this episode on audio in the usual podcast places, but this episode is also on YouTube. So, if you want to see us, and more importantly, see the chat messages that are scrolling by over here, which is really fun. For example, there’s now a vigorous discussion going on about bands that we fan, that we stan. We don’t just fan them, we stan them. So, that’s going on, so you can check that out on our YouTube channel.

Ben, I have a question. Words of the Year, have you changed your feeling about our Words of the Week? You used to be very much against Words of the Week, and now I think that you’ve kind of come around.

BEN: Uh… Do you know in… Okay, full disclosure, okay. Everyone’s going to see how the sausage gets made here. In fact, this is…

DANIEL: I know what you’re going to say.

BEN: This is hot off the press. Not even Daniel actually knows this, I think.

DANIEL: I guessed.

BEN: He might have known. I don’t look forward to this show.

DANIEL: What?

BEN: And by that, I mean, like, I want to be clear, I love everyone here. Doing this show is just the coolest, funnest thing. I’ve been doing it for like 12 years now. I adore this show. This particular episode every year, I’ve always got this real… What’s the word I’m looking for? Like, almost resentment or defensiveness towards.

Now, having said that, I’ve done a whole bunch of work on myself. I’ve been to therapy about this particular issue in me. So, I want everyone to know that I am approaching it with an open heart, but I am acknowledging my feelings. I don’t even actually… I haven’t fully excavated. I was joking about therapy. I haven’t fully excavated [DANIEL LAUGHS] why I feel the way I feel about this particular episode. Because you’re right, Daniel, I have mellowed on Words of the Week. I used to performatively sort of amp it up. And these days, I really do enjoy chatting about it and finding new words and interesting words. But there is a genuine sort of resistance for this episode, and I don’t know why. And now that I’m here, I’m having a great time. Yeah, it’s bizarre. It’s bizarre.

DANIEL: No. I think a few people feel that way about Words of the Year. It’s like, “Why do people do this?” Like, a lot of people have fun with it, but a lot of people are like, “What is this? And why is the Word of the Year three words?” or something?

BEN: And why are you making a fuss? It’s just words.

DANIEL: Mignon, have you noticed this? How do people feel? What’s the vibe that you’re getting?

MIGNON: Yeah, no, I always hear that if it’s more than one word, if it’s a phrase, you always hear like, “Well, that’s not a word.” [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I think people like it. They like to look back and think about the year. Often, it’s a great… Someone will say a word that you haven’t thought of, and you’ll be like, “Ah, yes, I had forgotten about that, but yes, it was everywhere,” or something like that. I think most people enjoy it.

DANIEL: Yeah.

MIGNON: Just not Ben.

BEN: [LAUGHS] No, I do. It’s one of those things like once it’s begun, it’s okay. It’s great. Argh, look, like I said, I need to do some more work on myself clearly.

DANIEL: I get you though. I get you, though. It’s like Collins goes off first always, and then it’s like, “Oh, god, it’s like Christmas in September. Are we starting already?”

BEN: Oh, my gosh. [LAUGHS]

MIGNON: That’s true. It does feel like you go to the hardware store and suddenly there’s trees in September, because they start early.

DANIEL: Totes. Well, our audience for this episode is dominated by patrons. We’ve got loads and loads of patrons jammed into this Zoom room. They’ve given us their support, attention, and ideas for the whole of the year. We want to thank you for your support by having you join us for this episode, but also by sending you our annual mailout. That’s for paid patrons at any level. It’s almost done. The packages have been arriving at my house and they’re almost all here.

BEN: So many packages. What a great time of the year to be doing mailing as well, Daniel. I bet you’re very popular down at the post office.

DANIEL: I feel very Santa Claus-y. I really do. I mean, I’ve got the Linguistic Chaos Goblin stickers from Trudy and Doug of Oglaf. We’ve got the Grammar Hills magnet, we’ve got the Holostar logo sticker, and we’re just waiting on the postcards, but once they get here, I’m shipping them out. So, patrons, please make sure that Patreon has your correct mailing address. And if you’re listening to this and you’re not a patron, come join us, that’s patreon.com/becauselangpod. And thank you to all of our great patrons. All right, ready to start?

BEN: It’s time.

DANIEL: Let’s just… I’m going to just start naming them off and we’re going to give our thoughts. We’re going to do some free associating. We’re going to be…

BEN: It’s like Seinfeld. I’m going to name names.

DANIEL: We’re going to be pulling from chat, so get those messages in there. First one, it’s always Collins. Collins is always first. And their word was BRAT. Brat.

BEN: Brat, brat, brat.

DANIEL: Brat.

MIGNON: Brat.

DANIEL: I define this as having a confident, independent and hedonistic attitude. As described by pop star Charli XCX, “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes.” We also saw brat summer.

BEN: Question.

DANIEL: Yes?

BEN: Do we think that this is being pulled from kink community?

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, tell me about the kink usage, because I was going to go there too.

BEN: Um. So, it’s always so… I find, like, I would like to conceive of myself as a very sex positive individual, but I still feel compelled when I’m talking about something like this to be like, “Full disclosure, everyone, I myself am not a brat,” but like, it shouldn’t matter at all, but there’s that weird, like I’m almost like ashamed on some tiny stupid level to know this. So, I’m going to try and dispose of that. Within kink circles, and the reason I want to say this isn’t something that I’m a full bottle on is because I don’t want people to walk away from this explanation being like, “Well, I heard on this podcast,” so go do your own research.

But a brat, within kink communities, you can classify people’s proclivities in various ways. And a brat is like a subgenre of a particular type of kink, which is broadly sort of falls under sub, a person who likes to not have sort of “the power” in some sort of play sex-type session. A brat as a subgenre of that, or a subcategorisation of a sub, is a person who can be quite cheeky, quite naughty. So not what you would necessarily typically or like stereotypically think of as a submissive type of person.

DANIEL: You are really overwording this. What is going on?

BEN: I don’t know. Well, I want people to have like… So, a brat is a type of sub who is naughty, essentially.

DANIEL: Yeah. So, you can engage in bratting. This is a special tactic that your person can use when they’re trying to annoy you for attention. It’s like, “Play with me.” “No, I don’t want to play with you. I’m doing my work.” “You can’t do your work if it’s… all over the room! Whooo!”

[LAUGHTER]

“Well, now you’re in for it. And you’re getting a spankaroo.” So, you’re provoking your top. Have I described the situation? I have… That’s the best I can do.

BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, no, that was awesome.

DANIEL: Okay, great. Well, I am unaware to the extent to which this overlaps with the practice of bratting, which is super fun. But it does seem to have overlapped politically because Charli XCX — good album, by the way, Brat — tweeted, “Kamala IS brat,” and therefore sort of intersected with the moment at the time. Honestly, feels like Collins went a little early.

BEN: [LAUGHS]

MIGNON: It felt like it was sort of a flash in the pan to me. I haven’t heard anyone use it in the last couple of months, probably.

DANIEL: That’s so brat.

MIGNON: [LAUGHS] I did listen to a bunch of music to prepare for this episode. I’m learning so much. I’m so much more culturally literate than I even was five minutes ago.

DANIEL: Favourite track?

MIGNON: The hit, Von Dutch was very good.

DANIEL: Von Dutch was very good.

MIGNON: Yes.

DANIEL: I’ve said this before. The algorithm suggested it to me and young ones in the car and we’ve vibed hard with it.

MIGNON: No. I also looked up how she got her name, Charli XCX. So, it turns out that it’s… I’m like, “What is that? Is it some Roman numeral or something?” No, it means kiss-Charli-kiss.

DANIEL: Oh, there you go. That’s lovely.

MIGNON: It was apparently her MSN messenger handle when she was a teen. [LAUGHS]

BEN: Oh, wow. I didn’t realise Charli XCX was as close to my age as that necessarily makes her. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yep, she is. I noticed James in chat who says, “Since I’m from the Midwest, I still sometimes read BRAT as brat [brat], which is short for bratwurst.”

BEN: [LAUGHS] Give me the brat.

DANIEL: You can eat hot brats. Okay, but you know what? I’ll pass. Let’s go on the Australia National Dictionary Center. So, this one’s going to have an Aussie flavor. COLESWORTH. Ben, tell me about Colesworth.

BEN: I have not encountered this word in the wild…

DANIEL: Okay.

BEN: …for lack of a better phrase. But the Australian in me is able to backwards engineer what’s going on here. In Australia, our supermarket market is severely dominated by two very large players. One is called Coles and one is called Woolworths. No, I believe, overt relation to other names like that in other markets globally. And that duopoly has sort of wreaked havoc, for lack of a better phrase, on prices and that sort of thing. So, I’m assuming this is a portmanteau of the two words to sort of signify Frankenstein’s monster in this market sort of thing.

DANIEL: Yep, you got it. We do have this Australian problem. We’re a large country, but we don’t have that many people and we import a lot of things, so there’s very few suppliers. There was an investigation this year of price gouging on the show Four Corners, which is kind of like 60 Minutes — 64 corner minutes? — in which they interviewed the CEO of Woolworths, and he walked out of the interview and subsequently resigned. So, the interview went really badly when that happens.

BEN: [LAUGHS] “How’d the interview go?” “I’m not employed there anymore.”

DANIEL: I’m out of here. So, yes, it’s a portmanteau of Coles and Woolworths with the implication that they’re both the same. By the way, do any Americans feel like it’s funny that Woolworths is an Australian brand?

MIGNON: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s like my grandmother’s company, when my grandma shopped.

BEN: So, it’s almost like a Macy’s or something like that, like an old school, like it’s been around for a long time.

JAMES: Do they even exist in the US anymore?

DANIEL: James asks. I think not… I think it ceased existing in the 1990s. At least that’s what the Wikipedia page says, which also says the name Woolworths in Australia was legally taken to capitalise on the FW Woolworth name since they did not do business in Australia and had not registered the trademark there. So, it’s basically…

BEN: So, it’s just an absolute shameless brand grab.

DANIEL: Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

BEN: Okay, so redact what I said before, folks, absolutely is related to, just not in a very noble or ethical way.

DANIEL: Yep. Next one, Cambridge with MANIFEST. Has anyone been manifesting anything? Anybody have any feels on this?

BEN: I have not been… Well, I mean, look, it’s astrology adjacent, isn’t it?

DANIEL: It is, yes. It is.

BEN: [LAUGHS] Which is about as critical as I’m going to get. And I will now sort of step back from the microphone.

DANIEL: Oh, I’ll get critical in your stead.

BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS] Good, good, good.

DANIEL: Celebrities like singer Dua Lipa, gymnast Simone Biles, have talked about manifesting, that is putting your goals out there, making a big wish and sending your goal to the universe so that the universe, which essentially functions like a wish-granting machine, will make it happen.

MIGNON: It’s not like they worked their butts off or anything.

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: I think that there could be some really positive things about looking at your goal every day and saying, “You know what? I want that thing. I’m going to work on that thing. I’m going to mentally sort of direct myself toward doing that thing,” in which case, it is you doing that thing.

BEN: Yeah. You’ve described self-discipline, [LAUGHS] that’s what that is.

MIGNON: [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Do you know what? Can I just share a personal story though?

BEN: Yes.

DANIEL: Like, it’s a very compelling illusion because how many wishes do we throw out into the universe every day? And I was standing there on a street with my sons at a park and I was thinking, “Dang, this street. It is so nice. And I am depressed because as a linguist with no prospects, I will never probably be able to live on a street like this.” And I now live on that street. The universe has coincidentally worked it out. And if I were a believer in The Secret or in manifesting, I could say, “Oh, I did something to put a wish out there in the universe which then came true.” And I could make that my origin story or something, but there are many wishes that we make. Many things happen to us and some of them are just going to line up.

MIGNON: Yeah, I saw multiple people in the chat saying it made them think of The Secret, and it did me too immediately. I’m like, “That’s old. Oh, I guess the kids are discovering this thing, rediscovering it, kids today.” But I did…

BEN: That’s like, what, 20 years ago now? or thereabouts?

MIGNON: At least probably, no, more. It would be more. Yeah, but I also listened to Dua Lipa in preparation for this episode.

BEN: [LAUGHS] You’ve really done your research. I like this.

MIGNIN: Doing my homework.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I’ve got to say that The Secret sort of repackaged these ideas, but you can go even farther back to an old, just a really ancient document called The Master Key, which is basically the same kinds of ideas and its… As faith erodes — traditional religious faith — we sort of pick up the things that made it work, like confirmation bias and we sort of bring them into the world. Now, the nasty side is that it could be a form of victim blaming. When something bad happens to someone, what happened? Did they fail to manifest sufficiently? Did they maybe wish something bad onto themselves? So, this is a dangerous sort of idea.

BEN: I think the other sort of pernicious aspect to like a genuine heartfelt, enthusiastic belief in manifestation is that it sort of gives a free pass on systems issues. Like, if your worldview is that if I just need to like really want something and think about and focus on it and then it’ll happen, that sort of allows you to not go, “Oh, hang on, wait, no, I’m not getting like the job that I really need or the apartment I really need or whatever because the system is barked and it needs to change.” So, that’s also a thing that I’m just a little bit like [ONOMATOPOEIA] about.

MIGNON: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: The just world fallacy.

BEN: Yeah.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm.

MIGNON: There was an interesting little insight from Cambridge about how they choose their word because they mentioned that RESILIENCE, RESILIENCE was actually more frequently looked up, but they didn’t think it was as linguistically interesting as manifest, so they chose MANIFEST instead.

DANIEL: I do think that MANIFEST is pretty interesting.

MIGNON: Yeah. That’s all.

DANIEL: I long for resilience as well. Hmm, Tricky. Well, the next one came from Macquarie Dictionary in Australia. It was ENSHITTIFICATION.

BEN: A little bit late to the game, Macquarie.

DANIEL: It’s nice that this was Macquarie’s word of the year because it’s a great reminder of last year when it was OUR word of the year.

BEN: Macquarie. How Macquarie is that? Just watching us and being like, “No, I’ll just copy their work.”

DANIEL: Well, we know the people from Macquarie, we know who’s on the board, so we’re just…

BEN: I’m being silly.

DANIEL: …giving them a little dig there. Unfortunately, enshittification has only gotten enshittier.

BEN: Yeah, yeah. Only yet more appropriate.

DANIEL: I’m afraid so. So, let’s move on from ENSHITTIFICATION and move on to DEMURE from Dictionary.com, that was their word. Restrained in appearance and demeanor, part of a catchphrase used by lifestyle and beauty influencer, Jools Lebron, “Very demure, very mindful.” Anybody got any feels on this one?

MIGNON: Yeah, I felt it was also like just a flash.

BEN: Yeah.

MIGNON: It’s funny, it went completely viral. I made a very demure, very mindful joke about a week after it happened and I felt like I am so late. [LAUGHTER] And now, it’s like…

BEN: [LAUGHS] Just landed like a lead balloon.

MIGNON: …Word of the Year? But it was a lot of other dictionaries. It was in the runners up lists too.

DANIEL: A lot.

MIGNON: Yeah. One of them said they… I guess they said it felt like… Because when she was talking about very demure, very mindful, she was talking about her hair and makeup and how you should look when you go to work. And so, they thought maybe like it tied into the return-to-office push that’s been happening in the world.

DANIEL: We’re trying to link it to something desperately so that we can make a piece out of it, so that it’s not the new CHEUGY. No! this must not be allowed to fade!

BEN: See, this is the thing, right?

MIGNON: I agree. Return to office, boo.

BEN: Yeah, like, I feel like CHEUGY, this is one of those words that like… I feel like that almost needs these various lexicographers and that sort of thing need like a little almost like a logic gate of like, “Was the half-life of this word less than like a week?” And if the answer is yes, it just shouldn’t go on any lists. It’s like a shooting star. It was just like there and it was gone. And so, yeah, I don’t know… When they said it just seems so meme-y but in the not good way, like in the just there and gone.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I look at our Words of the Week from January and February and I’m like, “Ugh, I can scarcely even remember these. Ugh.”

BEN: Yeah.

DANIEL: And that’s the nature of words, they are bubbles. These are these phrases that we say. I heard somebody being critical of Gen Xers who say ALL THE THINGS. “I’m going to clean all the things.” Please stop, they said saying ALL THE THINGS, you just sound old. And I’m like, “Oh my gosh. So, another part of me that’s no longer relevant.” James says…

BEN: [LAUGHS] keeps falling off.

DANIEL: James in chat says, “Your point is on fleek.” Thank you, James. [LAUGHTER] Can’t do better than that. The Economist’s Word of the Year, KAKISTOCRACY. That was one of our words of the week just a little while ago. It’s the rule of the poopy, that’s right. [LAUGHTER] Greek kakistos, the worst, which ultimately comes from Proto-Indo-European kaka, which means POOP. It’s the rule of the people who are the poopiest. I feel like this is a very Economist Word of the Year because they would…

BEN: Yes, 100%. You’ve taken the Word of the Year from an economics periodical, like it’s… [CHUCKLES], yeah.

DANIEL: Can you imagine them sitting about which ones to do? “Oh, it’s one of those $10 words, right? Oh, let’s do that one.” They’re so farty and turgid in an establishment way.

BEN: Now, one of the things that I think is interesting here is, do we think that this is just The Economist’s version of DEMURE? So, for instance, the word I think of when I see this word is KLEPTOCRACY, which has had really good legs. That is a word that we came up with to talk about sort of systems of governance, where… the classic example being if you get pulled over by the police, you can give them a bit of money and then you’ll be sort of on your way sort of thing where people in positions of power will steal things to get by. That has endured a lot. I can’t see this enduring in that way. This seems like a nice, fun, funny word, but not necessarily like a long… Whoa, one would hope there’s not a good reason for this word to stay around for a long time.

DANIEL: It’s entertaining. It certainly is. And that’s kind of what we’re doing. Speaking of entertaining, let’s go with the one from Oxford University Press. Not the Oxford English Dictionary, but Oxford University Press. They went with… They had a really good pick as far as economy of choice goes, because they chose BRAIN ROT, which is a loose collection of slang used by generation alphas. Well, let’s get started. What’s collectively inside the brain rot basket? Mignon, what do you think of it?

MIGNON: Well, SKIBIDI. SKIBIDI OHIO. Yeah, that’s what I think of. But you know what I love about brain rot is that it came from Walden, so Thoreau. I actually pulled this quote because Thoreau used it in Walden. He said, “While England endeavors to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain rot?”

DANIEL: Hmm.

MIGNON: Thoreau.

BEN: In convergent evolution or plucked, do we think?

MIGNON: [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: It’s just the kind of thing that people worry about, isn’t it? I mean, there was a hyperventilating thing in The Guardian saying, “Oh, BRAIN ROT is a great term, but also the internet really is rotting our brains, and here’s evidence.” They managed to tie it back to something. Let’s talk about OHIO. What’s up with Ohio?

MIGNON: Like, nonsense words. I don’t know. There’s some meme where there’s like a head and a toilet. I don’t know if that’s related to Ohio, but it’s all memes all the way down.

DANIEL: Okay, we’ll go with the… We’ll go with the skibidi toilet. It’s the video series on TikTok by Alexey Gerasimov about a head in a toilet singing or saying skibidi bop, bop. I haven’t even watched it, so I don’t even know.

MIGNON: James says OHIO equals boring or mid.

BEN: Poor Ohio. I’m here for the Midwest. Ohio is very beautiful and there’s lots to recommend Ohio. I feel bad for O… O-HI-oans? Ohi-O-ans?

DANIEL: They are O-hi-O-ans.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I’ve read it as something embarrassing or weird. People have been posting these “only in Ohio” memes, which are these bizarre incidents in the state. Very similar to Florida Man doing things. Florida Man is still out there. Also, very similar to Texas, which is what they say in Norway, when something is weird.

BEN: Oh, I didn’t know that.

MIGNON: It’s very Texas.

DANIEL: It’s so Texas.

BEN: That’s so Texan. I love it.

DANIEL: No, it’s Texas.

BEN: Oh, okay.

DANIEL: That’s so Texas. So now, Ohio joins the weird club along with Florida and Texas. Congratulations, Ohio. There’s also RIZZ. We talked about RIZZ extensively. That was huge last year. There’s also FANUM TAX, “I’m so rizz, I might have fanum tax.”

MIGNON: I don’t know what that is.

BEN: Phantom tax.

DANIEL: Take a guess.

BEN: Phantom as in Phantom?

DANIEL: No, it’s F-A-N-U-M.

BEN: Oh no, I’m out.

DANIEL: Okay, I’m just going to read this from Urban Dictionary.

MIGNON: Oh-oh.

DANIEL: “FANUM TAX comes from the comedy creator Fanum, who is a member of Streamer Kai Cenat’s influencer crew, AMP.” Let’s just meditate on that for a second. You can be part of an influencer crew in 2024, that is a thing. I’ll continue: “the phrase refers to the way Fanum would jokingly tax other members of AMP in 2022 by taking bits of their food when they were eating,” according to Know Your Meme. [LAUGHS]

BEN: Okay, so it’s just sibling behaviour, essentially.

DANIEL: Haven’t you ever grabbed some food and said, “Dad tax”?

BEN: I have not, no, because I am not a terrible person. Also, I really, really, really, really hate sharing my food. So, I don’t want to make it seem like people can take food from my plate.

DANIEL: Okay, fair enough. Grabbing food from others, probably not great behaviour. Well, those terms are… SKIBIDI, for example, could be something really good, something really bad, it’s all in context. And I was talking about this with my hairstylist, and she said this makes no sense. None of this makes any sense. And I said, “That’s why they like it.” Well, you’ve got to talk about something, haven’t you? What do you think?

BEN: Bamboozles the old folk.

DANIEL: It sure does. Okay, if there’s no more comment on that. Yeah. LordMortis says “Dadaist humor is in,” and I am kind of encouraged that there’s a kind of absurdism going on with the young folk. I think it’s great, let’s bring back Dada. Dax says, “Daniel has a hairstyle?”

BEN: I know I was… I’m going to be honest, I was a little bit… That one, that seemed like the actual, the lead there, Daniel.

DANIEL: Was HAIRSTYLIST sort of too much of a word? Should I have gone for BARBER?

BEN: Look, mate, you do you.

DANIEL: We all live with a measure of self-deception. Merriam Webster’s Word of the Year: POLARIZATION.

BEN: Ooh, now this is getting closer to, like… There’s some meat on the bone here, I reckon.

MIGNON: I like that it’s related to the poles of the globe.

DANIEL: Yeah.

MIGNON: They’re so far apart.

BEN: Oh yeah. And one imagines probably by that logic, magnetism as well, like attracting and repelling and all that kind of stuff.

DANIEL: Oh, that’s pretty juicy.

BEN: I think… But I also just think, given the moment, for lack of a better phrase, not just in America but in many, many places around the world, this is a very… This one feels like it has a substance that a lot of the other words kind of haven’t had. It’s a lot less meme-y. It’s a lot more like, this describes a pretty significant aspect of our social reality now. So, for that reason, that’s why I’m kind of like ooh.

DANIEL: Hmm. I feel that. I feel that. We used to get information from a lot of places, but largely the same outlets. There were places you could go, but there were only a certain number of places. And they had an interest in being reliable and fact checking themselves and each other so that we could have trust in them. And then, the internet created a way for anybody to have an outlet. Which is good. That’s the democratisation of information. But then, AnonymousTroll1488 had a way to get his views out there. So, now we had a choice. We could continue to listen to traditional media gatekeepers who were having economic problems of their own as attention and money moved away from them. Or, we could just jump into a chum bucket of views from everybody, and hope that we could sort out the information from the disinformation with no training.

So, our sources of information are now potentially so diverse that we can’t even agree on a narrative of reality from which we can move forward. And so now, we’ve got, I think, a lot of traditionalists… or what’s the axis here? I guess there’s the conspiratorial side. There’s the everyone is lying to you side. And then, there’s the sort of establishments have had their failings but gatekeepers are… Professionals, experts are a good thing… Is it expertise versus conspiratorial? Is that the axis?

BEN: I think that’s one spectrum across which people can fall. But I think you… Like those terrible old personality tests that are not evidence based, you can actually probably ratchet someone across a few of them, right?

DANIEL: Mm-hmm.

BEN: So, another one that I tend to think of would be engaged versus not engaged. I don’t know if this is true elsewhere in the world, but here in Australia, there is a real, shall we say, problem. Yeah, I’m just going to use the word “problem.” There is a real habit amongst many middle-class Australians to just very openly be like, “Well, I don’t much go in for that politics stuff.” Like, when you talk about issues that are happening or stuff that’s going on or like, god forbid I mention Gaza in a social setting. There’s a lot of Australians who would prefer to just have things be chill and non-conflict and confrontational conversationally than actually and so…

But then because of that they will sort of go out of their way to really quite deliberately not expose themselves to much information that’s out there. Not because they delight in being ignorant necessarily, but because being politically aware is work and it’s hard, and some people don’t want to do that work. They would rather put their efforts in elsewhere, that’s the most generous I can be about that. That’s another spectrum that I see a lot which is people who are just like, “Ah, I can’t be…” Who can be bothered, right?”

DANIEL: Ariaflame says some of us are burnt out on it. I would argue some people have convinced themselves that attempting to be politically neutral is a politically neutral stand and it’s not. It’s not.

BEN: Being not engaged is also, I think, a definitive sign of privilege.

DANIEL: Yes.

BEN: Only the privilege get to be not engaged, which I’m not criticising anyone. Like, people have to look out for themselves, and there’s probably a bunch of people in this chatroom right now who are sitting there being like, “Yeah, but I’m really tired,” and I get that. Capitalism is a motherfucker, and it really does a great job at making sure we’re exhausted as much as possible so that things like this are just a bit too hard for us.

But if we as a society aren’t willing to lean forward a bit… because that’s the thing about the old system of news. And I’ve said this before on the show. This is like Ben Ainslie’s little hokey thing that he says to his students. Journalism used to be eating your vegetables. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t entertaining. It was the boring thing that you did because you understood that it was an important part of what needed to happen in life and in society and that sort of thing. And then, Fox News, amongst others, certainly, not them alone, were like, “Ooh, what if it could be like hamburgers?” And that’s just sort of what’s happened to news over the last 30 years. And it’s tough, it’s hard, it doesn’t get to be fun. Being educated about what’s going on in the world is work and it is labor, and some of us, a lot of us have to do it, but we’re not… And yeah, it’s a tricky one.

MIGNON: Yeah, I mean, for the word POLARIZATION. I tend to agree with LK in the chat that it’s really like both-sides bullshit. It’s a word you’re likely to hear on the evening news or in the big newspapers, but it implies that all things are equal, the two sides, the poles. And there really are just a lot of people out there telling lies. So, to say, “We’re polarized,” is maybe not an accurate picture of what’s happening.

DANIEL: So, there was a survey where they got people to answer factual questions about political stuff and they asked them where they got their news from. And the group that did the worst was the Fox News viewers. They answered the questions the least accurately. Worse than people who said they consumed no news at all.

BEN: [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: What that means is going outside and banging your head on a rock in the garden is a better source of news than right-wing media, who admits to lying to and deceiving their audience. As opposed to the network of journalists and people, who do get it wrong, deserve criticism sometimes, but who have ways of checking each other out and who have an interest in being reliable.

Okay, phew. Let’s go on to… We’re just to wrap it up. Our listeners have given us words in languages other than English. The German youth word is AURA, which now has acquired a new sense of having rizz. Being cool, doing good things.

BEN: That’s certainly not relegated to German youth, I can tell you that much.

DANIEL: No, no, it’s going around the English-speaking world. Ben, you mentioned this on a couple of episodes ago.

BEN: Yeah, this is the new “it” thing though. I would be interested to see if this has staying power or if this is just going to be another flash in the pan thing as so much of teen lexical sort of proclivities tend to be. It’s like I always wonder what makes something the Backstreet Boys? Teenagers now listen to the Backstreet Boys. They can sing word for word the entire thing of like, [SINGS] “I Want It That Way.” Like, what makes something be that and to not be, I don’t know, like Bomfunk MC’s, which was huge when I was a kid alongside the Backstreet Boys, but no one young knows Freestyler. But yeah, like what… How do you be Backstreet Boys linguistically and not find yourself being iconic Finnish funk electro duo Bomfunk MC’s?

DANIEL: I’ve asked myself that question over…

BEN: [LAUGHS] Every day.

DANIEL: …and over again. Lynnika and James have also pointed out that aura points are a way to quantify your aura, which I like quite a lot. Brazil’s word — and please jump in, everyone — Brazil’s word: ANXIETY, ANSIEDADE. And I’m saying that completely wrong, but Brazil, are you okay? That’s how a person pronounces that word if they’ve known several Brazilians.

MIGNON: I don’t remember the numbers, but they… ANXIETY beat like the second word in the survey by like one or two percentage points. It like was barely… They had like five words they all voted on and it was like 21%, 19%. Yeah, like they were very close. I don’t remember what the other words were though.

DANIEL: Right. Okay.

BEN: Wouldn’t it be funny if they were all just synonyms for ANXIETY.

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] ANXIETY. The next one was APPREHENSION. Number three, DREAD coming in at three. Let’s go on to Hawaiian, MĀKIA, which means something like aim, motto or purpose. It serves as a powerful reminder to move forward with intention and clarity. I like it, MĀKIA.

MIGNON: Mm-hmm.

BEN: That’s nice.

MIGNON: It’s a good way to live.

BEN: Yeah. What’s your mākia?

DANIEL: Hmm. I wonder how it’s used. And then Japan, FUTE HODO, which is the name of a television show that got very popular. And in this show, a phys-ed teacher steps into a time vortex and moves from 1986 to 2024. I like the concept. Mm.

BEN: Oh, that could be really interesting. Like, I could see that as a fascinating vehicle for that to sort of interrogate some of Japan’s cultural… like, what things have moved on from the 1980s? What things haven’t moved on? It could have been a very interesting social commentary as a setup.

DANIEL: You know what? I do like the Trudy and Doug cartoon, the Oglaf cartoon about when Sleeping Beauty awakes and she’s like this horrible regressive person and a fairy comes and says, “Well, she is a hundred years old.”

[LAUGHTER]

MIGNON: Well, it translates as something like totally inappropriate, right?

BEN: Oh, okay.

DANIEL: Oh.

MIGNON: But then the description said that it’s not about just showing how he’s bad and wrong all the time. It’s sort of about understanding our differences. It sounded kind of lovely.

DANIEL: Hmm. Nice. Well, those were the words from everybody. We’re going to tackle our words, but first I think it’s time to play the greatest game in the world, and that is Related or Not. So, our theme music this time comes from Adam, who generated it using Suno AI. You ready?

[YET ANOTHER RELATED OR NOT THEME]

Ah, thank you. That was enjoyable.

BEN: I have not heard a lot of AI-generated audio yet, but it was so astounding how much like a ChatGPT script that sort of sounded like. Like, it was that sort of generically pleasant… It sounds like it could have been taken from one of those mid-range 3D animated kids movies on Netflix kind of thing.

DANIEL: Mm.

MIGNON: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: But populated with your words, Ben. Those were your lyrics.

BEN: I know. [LAUGHS] Oh, dear.

DANIEL: Well, it’s time for Related or Not, where we figure out whether two or more words share a common ancestor etymologically, or if the similarity between them is merely coincidental. This one comes from a story where I talked about a clerical error with my daughter. And she said, “What’s a clerical error?” And I said, “Oh, it’s a mistake on paper, such as a clerk might make.” And I thought, “Mm, CLERIC and CLERK.” Now, before you vote, we’re going to talk through some of ours. We’re even going to let you sort of advocate for or against some of the answers here, related or not. I’m going to go, Ben, do you want to go first? No, wait, we should have Mignon go first. We’ll push her into the ice.

MIGNON: Okay. Okay. Truthfully, I have no idea, but it seems to me that they should be related because clerics and clerks, they’re kind of the same thing. And a clerk would make a clerical error. But then, I feel like it’s too easy, like that it’s got to be a trick.

BEN: You’re hitting the red herring thing. Yeah, for sure.

MIGNON: Yeah. So, I am.

DANIEL: I will just remind you this is not from one of our listeners trying to muck us up. This arose naturally from a conversation that I had with my daughter and not from noticing it on a webpage or something like that.

MIGNON: But then, maybe you looked it up…

BEN: This is a farm-to-table.

MIGNON: [LAUGHTER] But then maybe you looked it up and you said, “This is very surprising, and I’ll make a quiz out of it.” Otherwise, why would you remember?

DANIEL: Would it change your mind if I said I proposed to use it for this show before I looked the answer up?

MIGNON: Okay, yeah, probably.

DANIEL: And I guessed the answer myself. I said this has got to be totally related. The CLER- is it’s probably just CLER- plus -IC, and then it got changed to CLERK.

BEN: That’s where I was heading as well. Like the red herring-o-meter is firing off on this one, but I think the relatedness is just a bit too related-y. I’m going to go with yes, it is related.

DANIEL: Related. All right, now it’s time for you to vote. I can see the votes, but nobody else can. Except, I think, Ben, you can. Wait, I haven’t made you a host yet.

BEN: No.

DANIEL: Okay.

BEN: I don’t want to know. Don’t ruin magic.

DANIEL: Have you voted? Did you click related? Okay, okay.

BEN: Yeah. No, I said related, and then I clicked not related because I’m a contrarian Daniel.

DANIEL: Can you change that now?

BEN: Nope, it’s no…

DANIEL: Yeah, so one of those is you. All right, I am going to end the poll there. There are more people who haven’t voted yet. I’ll give it three, two, one. Okay, and now I’m going to share the results. So, it looks like 15 of us said related, four of us said not related. What’s the correct answer? The correct answer is yeah, they’re totally related.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: CLERK is from Old English CLERIC. And then, they’re both related to clericus, church, Latin, clericus, a priest, which makes sense because writing and stuff was something that you could only do if you were in the priest class.

BEN: Was the holy job.

DANIEL: Does anybody come from a place where they say CLERK versus CLARK and there’s confusion?

BEN: We have CLARKS in Australia, don’t we? But only in certain things, like in a hospital, the person who administers the paperwork is like a ward clark, I believe.

DANIEL: Interesting. Mignon, what’s your view on this? Have you heard anyone say that someone is a CLARK?

MIGNON: Never. Never.

DANIEL: Okay, okay. Now, there’s an interesting thing here. You might have heard people say CLARK or CLERK. You might have heard Berkeley [bakli] Square, which is spelled with a B-E, not B-A. And also, there’s SERGEANT, which is said “sargent”, but it was just spelled “sergent”, what’s going on there?

Well, in the 1800s, a lot of words with ER were pronounced AR. People used to say that they were in the “sarvice” or that a “parson” came up and talked to them, especially if they were working class. So, how you say CLERK or CLARK depends on who was talking in your area, what social class they were, and then what was going on for that group, pronunciation wise. Okay, let’s go on to our second one. And this one comes from Dax from SpeechDocs.

BEN: Eyy. The man who has to translate my voice, you poor, awful…

DANIEL: MANIKIN and MANNEQUIN. You know, a mannequin with a Q is a dummy dressed up so you can see what the clothes look like, and a manikin is a little artist’s model that you can move around, so.

BEN: [LAUGHS] I didn’t know those two things were spelled differently. And now, I’m broken.

MIGNON: Same.

DANIEL: Welcome to the world we’ve all been living in. Well, should I start?

BEN: Well, actually, I think we should do this the other way around, Daniel. I think we should get everyone to vote and then we should see the responses because I worry that us talking about it is influencing the thing. So, let everyone just go in blind. Then, we’ll give our reasons as to what we thought about how we voted.

DANIEL: I kind of like influencing the vote. I like…

BEN: Oh, you power hungry monster.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, okay. People are voting. There they go. Oh, they’re pouring in. Okay, we have a majority of the votes here. Maybe I’ll start. I think that they might be unrelated.

BEN: So, your red herring-o-meter is firing off really well.

DANIEL: It is. I’m aware that Irish has a suffix -IN, a diminutive suffix. And we see it in names like Colleen and Maureen. We also see it in words like SMITHEREENS, which is a diminutive of Irish smiother, a fragment. So, I’m wondering if a manikin with a K is a little man and then the mannequin with a Q came a different way through French or something. That’s my guess.

BEN: I went with related on this one because whilst my red herring-o-meter was firing off fully. I just couldn’t get away from how identical they are. It really just feels like different languages spelling of the exact same thing for the exact same thing, I guess. So, I went related.

MIGNON: That was my thinking too. I voted related there. It’s like a big thing and a small thing, the same thing spelled very similarly.

BEN: And you pose them both as well, that’s the other thing. Like mannequins, the things that you can put clothes on, can have postures and all sorts of things. So, it just seems so similar.

DANIEL: Okay, I’m going to share the results. 84% of us said related. Only 16% said not related. Does anybody… Do you want to… Either of you two want to change your votes?

BEN: I don’t, but I’m… I hope it’s not related so those three or four people can feel so victorious.

DANIEL: Yeah, the answer is they’re totally related. [BEN GROANS] They’re both “little man” from Dutch “manneken”. I’m unaware the extent to which the -IN is related to the Irish diminutive, but there you go. All right.

BEN: Next.

DANIEL: Okay, this one comes from MVP Chris. Chris says MARSH, MARSHAL, and MARTIAL. Chris says, “I haven’t looked up relatedness, but was watching a YouTube video about Rome,” as you do. “And they talked about the Campus Martius, which had been a marsh that was sometimes used as a location to drill troops.” And then, I thought: Wait, is CAMP just Latin CAMPUS? And it is, but we’ve got five different choices. MARSH, MARSHAL — the kind that like a U.S. marshal or marshaling troops — and then MARTIAL having to do with soldiers. You got: ain’t none of them related. MARSH is the odd one out. MARSHAL’s the odd one out. MARTIAL is the odd one out. Or, they’re all related? So, people are thinking about this one. I think while people are thinking, I think we better say, Ben, you go first.

BEN: This reminds me of PITCH. You remember that one?

DANIEL: I remember PITCH. It had all these senses to PITCH.

BEN: To pitch a tent, to the place where you would play soccer or cricket or something like that, which is a very obviously, like English and Australian word for it. And the fact that [IN A HAUGHTY VOICE] if I recall correctly, Daniel, the field and to pitch a tent were related because you would often billet soldiers on a field, that thing got called a pitch. Pitching a tent, blah, blah, blah, blah. For that reason, I’m going with these things are all related despite the fact that when you said this, I was like, a marsh is a terrible place to get a bunch of people together. But I’m wondering if our sort of understanding of a marsh now and I’m also wondering if this is related to “marcher” as well as a fourth associated term.

I’m wondering if marsh back in the days of Rome isn’t necessarily the kind of like boggy, moorish, fen type thing that we tend to think of it now like a wetlands environment and instead just meant kind of an open space, like a treeless space where you could get people to do stuff. So, for that reason, I’m going with all related.

DANIEL: Okay, Mignon, what do you got?

MIGNON: Yeah, I am super frustrated because I wrote about this topic back when some congressman spelled martial law wrong but it was so long ago that I actually can’t remember what I wrote! [LAUGHTER] But I think they’re different. I think MARTIAL, the -IAL, I think it’s has a different origin, but I can’t remember. But I wrote about it.

BEN: You’re describing my entire history. Don’t worry.

DANIEL: That’s my life, don’t worry. Are you saying ain’t none of them related?

MIGNON: No, I’m saying martial, M-A-R-T-I-A-L, is the odd one out, I think.

BEN: Oh, okay. Interesting.

MIGNON: I know I didn’t write about MARSH, just the root word MARSH. It was just all the variants of MARTIAL.

DANIEL: I said no to MARSH. But I do…

BEN: The place.

DANIEL: The swampy place, because that just feels like Old English to me. And the other ones seemed Latin, except I wasn’t sure about the MARSHAL with an SH, so I said MARSH is the odd one out.

BEN: Before we see everyone’s answers, can we just do a little bit of a explore on… So, MARSHAL, M-A-R-S-H-A-L, is to move people or to move things, livestock and it can also be a job that you do like a law enforcement officer. MARTIAL, M-A-R-T-I-A-L, is also to do with like law enforcement, but like the application of quite strict stringent and sort of if you break the rules, very quite severe punishments will come your way type thing. Is that how we’re operating with these words?

DANIEL: Yes. And I took a look at MARSHAL with an SH and I found out that yes, it is the job that you do, but it’s also the getting the soldiers together. Those two are the same word because that’s what a Marshal does. Okay, I’m going to close this one off and I’m going to share the results.

BEN: Okay, we’ve got a fairly… like, there’s a distribution.

DANIEL: Okay. Most people think Marsh is the odd one out. A few people think that MARTIAL, TI, is the odd one out, but a lot of people are saying, “Eh, you know what? They’re all related.” So, it’s nice that I picked the most common answer at least. It was wrong.

BEN: Oh, oh.

DANIEL: The real answer is one that nobody picked.

BEN: Oh, no way.

DANIEL: So, which one is that?

BEN: Are none of them related?

DANIEL: Ain’t none of them related.

BEN: Wow.

MIGNON: Wow.

DANIEL: MARSH comes from Old English merssh from Proto-Germanic, *marisko. The MARSHAL with an SH is not related to MARSH, but it is related to a kind of horse, what kind?

BEN: I don’t know. A MARE?

DANIEL: A mare. That’s it.

BEN: Oh, wow.

DANIEL: A MARSHAL is a horse servant. It’s two words, horse and servant.

BEN: Oh.

DANIEL: And then to marshal the troops is just what a marshal does. Now, MARTIAL with the TI comes from medieval Latin, “martialis”, of Mars, having to do with Mars.

BEN: Of war and that sort of thing.

DANIEL: Of war and all that kind of thing.

BEN: It’s wild to me that T-I-A-L and S-H-A-L are not related when the concepts are so close.

DANIEL: They are. They are. Okay, so thanks to Dax and thanks to Chris. Thanks to everybody who’s provided us with words and jingles all this year. We’re going to have more in the coming year, so keep them coming. If we didn’t get to yours, then send it again because it’s probably a lot of fun.

Let’s go on to our second bracket of words from the year, and I’m going to start with you, Mignon. Would you tell us what words were on your radar and did you have a Word of the Year this year?

MIGNON: I did. My Word of the Year, I thought VIBE should be the word of the year. The vibes are off. The vibes have changed. There’s an Instagram influencer suing another woman for stealing her vibe.

BEN: That is so interesting.

MIGNON: Yeah. I just saw this morning Google Maps has a neighborhood vibe feature. You can somehow click, and it’ll tell you the vibes of the neighborhood. I have been hearing this word constantly, and I’m shocked that nobody chose it.

BEN: I think that’s fair.

DANIEL: People have been sleeping on it.

BEN: You’re like the record picker who’s just like, “It’s going to be big, watch out.”

MIGNON: I mean, Daniel, you used it multiple times at the beginning of this Zoom too.

DANIEL: I did. It was on my mind. James has pointed out that the Russians have picked VIBE in the equivalent Cyrillic letters. It appears to be a loan word which just means vibe. But yes, the vibes are off. It’s a vibes election. It’s the vibe. Australians who have watched the movie, The Castle, will be well aware of that very quotable line. Is there a more quotable movie than The Castle? I think maybe not.

BEN: Possibly for my generation Napoleon Dynamite, that’s the only one I can come up with.

DANIEL: Yep, yep, yep. Cool. Thank you. That’s a good one. Let’s now go on to our listener, James. James, are you good to go? I’m going to pin you. I’ve asked James to…

JAMES: Oh, sure.

DANIEL: …come and present some of his that we didn’t get to because James has been an absolute ferret in tracking down Words of the Week. And so many have come from James, he’s the holder of the firehose. So, James, what are some that we haven’t gotten to that you really want to get out there?

JAMES: Yeah, one is TORMENT NEXUS, which actually is, I feel like, goes really well with ENSHITTIFICATION, except it’s deliberate. Enshittification because it comes from a tweet from 2021 that was by Alex Blechman, who said… And the tweet was “Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel, Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Don’t create the Torment Nexus.

JAMES: And so, Torment Nexus is just like this shorthand for dystopian concept that was never intended as a good idea to be invented, but people invent them anyway, like AI or apparently mirror life, so.

DANIEL: Or GROK. Grok is a term that’s been sort… or BABELFISH. We always do this with technology. We create these things, and it does really feel like tech bros or broligarchs really are driving the bus and we’re all hopelessly inside of it. I think that’s probably one of the vibes of our age for sure.

MIGNON: For sure.

BEN: Torment nexus is a fun one.

DANIEL: Yep, what else?

JAMES: BRUNCHLORD, which is… I just find a hilarious insult that I saw in context once. And Nancy Friedman did a really great Word of the Week post tracing the history of it, but it was kind of invented by this Guardian named Carl Bode on Bluesky in 2023. And it’s an insult for someone in upper management. And as Carl described, “My definition of brunchlord is not just somebody who likes brunch, which is most of us. It’s somebody that brunches a lot and has also failed upward into positions of unearned importance and routinely does nothing of actual value.” So, brunchlords will ruin your day in the corporate environment.

DANIEL: A failson who also likes brunch.

JAMES: Corporate failson.

MIGNON: I read Nancy’s newsletter too, Nancy Friedman’s newsletter, and she had… There’s a German equivalent that is Frühstücksdirektor, breakfast director in German. But a brunch lord is incompetent, whereas a Frühstücksdirektor is competent, so.

BEN: Oh, interesting.

DANIEL: Ah, okay.

BEN: I also feel like this has just a little bit of… I was unaware of this until going to America recently. Brunch has got a bit of a branding problem in America. There is a lot of hatred for brunch in America.

DANIEL: But brunch is wonderful.

BEN: Well, see, Daniel, that’s because you’ve gone native here in Australia. There is a lot of American hatred for brunch. I’ve heard a lot of people… Like, famously in The Bear, they’re like, brunch. And yeah, it’s a thing, some people in America think brunch culture and brunch as a thing is just fucking terrible and awful and they hate it.

DANIEL: Okay, well, let’s ask the local brunchlords. Let’s go on, James. What’s next?

JAMES: JARLIC, which is just a portmanteau for jarred garlic, which is one of those words that I heard. There’s a TikTok account called Chef Reactions, which is just a guy who is a chef reacting to people doing usually really bad recipes. And he always called it JARLIC. And I just kind of thought it was a joke. And then at some point, I was like, “Oh, wait, that’s actually a word.” And I googled it around and it’s like there’s articles on Eater and stuff like that, on defending jarlic, because the other thing is jarlic, it’s not fresh garlic. So, people have are very anti-jarlic, unless they like easy recipes, in which case they’re very pro jarlic, but jarlic is just kind of delightful.

BEN: [LAUGHS] I like it. It’s just like so good because it’s so close to garlic. And it’s got that J-G thing at work as well. It could just be JARLIC in the way that it’s Germany.

DANIEL: It could have been. It could have been. Gigantic jar of jarlic. Well, Jane from Space says, “Oh, it’s jeans garlic.” [LAUGHTER] Obviously, like jorts or jandals. I’ve got my gar of jarlic right here. Big jarlic defender. Watch out though. Yeah.

JAMES: We go with the peeled cloves that come from the store. So, it’s somewhere between fresh garlic and jarlic.

DANIEL: Wow. Okay. And what might you use jarlic in, in your perhaps the next word you’ve brought us?

JAMES: The next one I have is a MARRY-ME recipe. And specifically, the MARRY-ME part, because there was apparently this recipe called Marry-Me Chicken, which… And then I would see other recipes online that were like, it’s marry-me beef and marry-me brisket and marry-me short ribs and marry-me beans and marry-me lentils and cookies and marry-me cheesecake. And it’s like that literally cannot be some preparation or set of ingredients that sounds good with all of those things. And really, it’s just a recipe that’s so good that will inspire the person you serve it to propose or maybe accept your proposal.

DANIEL: First of all, you’re not getting married with those lentils. Okay, that’s not happening.

JAMES: [LAUGHS] But two vegans could get together and love each other very much.

BEN: Daniel’s bringing in that serious Simpsons you don’t make friends with salad vibe, which is odd because he’s a vegetarian. I’m not sure what’s going on there.

DANIEL: I am a vegetarian but, you know, I have my lines in the sand.

BEN: You don’t like to fart? Is that what it is?

DANIEL: No. Farting is awesome. Farting during brunch is twice as good, I just want to say. So, MARRY-ME DISH: the go-to meal when you’re closing the deal. Very good. And one more from you, James. I want to hear this one.

JAMES: Yeah, I know. We talked… I know we chat a little bit. YAPPING, which is another one of those brain rot words, frankly, except that it’s a really old word. And this one, I liked just because I heard my son using it, talking about yapping or people yapping. And I’m old, so my sense of yapping is that people doing that are annoying and yapping is a bad way of talking. And it’s really like you… It’s never positive, but it was obvious at some point that yapping didn’t have that connotation for him. And so, I dug around and it’s like, oh, people yapping. It’s like kids today use it more neutrally just to describe someone talking or monologuing or being really enthusiastic about it.

And I even noticed yesterday, Jamelle Bouie, the columnist on Bluesky, was talking about how he doesn’t capitalize in his tweets. And he’s like, “This seems to bother quite a few people, but the answer is that I’m just yapping and I don’t feel the need to add punctuation or capital isn’t necessary for meaning.” So, I love that it’s a really old word that had a very distinct connotation that I don’t even know that it was in fashion, but has it come back in a big way with a new vibe.

DANIEL: You noticed that one, Mignon.

MIGNON: Yeah. I think James and I hang out in all the same places apparently because I saw the post from Jamelle Bouie on Bluesky too. I was going to mention it with the yapping. [CHUCKLES]

JAMES: That felt like a very authoritative use somehow.

MIGNON: Yeah.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm, landmark. Landmark. I feel like we’re seeing amelioration happening in real time. It’s very exciting. Oh, my gosh. James, thank you so much for all the words that you bring, not just today, but all year round.

JAMES: You are very welcome. That’s me yapping.

BEN: Finger on the pulse. The firehose has been switched off, just temporarily.

DANIEL: I also noticed one that didn’t get in: CAUGHT IN 4K.

BEN: Oh, yes. Yeah. This is another very big with their young folk. This is something I hear at work. Let me put it that way.

DANIEL: Okay.

BEN: Yeah.

MIGNON: I don’t know this one. What is it?

DANIEL: Take a guess. You have to guess.

MIGNON: Like on video. Caught on video?

BEN: [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Video is the relevant reference. But if you’re caught in 4K, oh, there’s no question but that you did that thing. You were caught red handed. Ben, help me out.

BEN: Yeah, the way I’ve certainly heard it used is, my understanding is it might have come from possibly a sports lineage. When someone does something maybe like not good, like in basketball or like if someone gets dunked on or something like that, it’s literally caught in 4K, so you can see in just spectacular grainy detail how a person’s like undercarriage was just dangling on someone’s head kind of thing. It’s to signify that there is both no question as to the thing happening, but also the way I’ve heard it used to signify that the significant detail in which the thing was captured is also embarrassing, like the un-subtleness…

So, for instance, I pinged a kid for trying to sneak out of the classroom and I was like, “Oy, stop it.” And someone… But because it was like a quiet room and it was like really obvious, one of the other kids was like, “Woah, caught in 4k!” and the suggestion being that person should be more embarrassed than otherwise because it was so obvious what they had done wrong.

DANIEL: 4K image resolution is of course the standard for ultra-high definition. So, is it that each pixel is represented with a 4k number?

BEN: No. Daniel, you absolutely… I’m surprised at you, sir.

DANIEL: Why are you surprised?

BEN: You should be embarrassed. 4K just…

DANIEL: Always.

BEN: …means that there is nearly 4,000 pixels across the top of the standard 16:9 aspect ratio screen. So, it’s not actually 4,000. I think… someone help me out here.

LORDMORTIS: Yeah, yeah, it’s 4,000.

BEN: It’s like… Yeah, there you go.

DANIEL: Thanks, LordMortis.

BEN: Just thank you. Good on LordMortis.

DANIEL: I knew LordMortis would be in on this.

BEN: That’s all it means. In the same way that we used to say 1080, but strangely enough, 1080 comes from the side and sort of 4k comes from the top. Who knows?

LORDMORTIS: It’s an advertising thing. It’s because of advertising. Four is bigger than two.

BEN: [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: It is! It is.

BEN: God, humans are dumb, aren’t we?

DANIEL: Thank you for straightening me out on that. And now, it’s time for the Because Language Word of the Week of the Year. First, we’re going to have some stats on the vote. There were 511 votes across four platforms: Blue-esky, Twitter, Facebook and Discord. Sorry, I said that wrong: Twyter. Last year votes from Twyter were only 70% of those on Blue-esky. That is to say, even last year we got more votes on Bluesky, but this year Twitter votes are down to about a third of the Bluesky votes.

Now, there were some words that people liked on different platforms more. So, I’m describing these as very Bluesky words, very Twitter. Here they are. The very Bluesky words were #Xodus. That is the flight from Twitter.

BEN: Of course.

DANIEL: FUNDIE BABY VOICE, the teeny-weeny voice that sometimes women in Christian circles use to not be threatening to men. And WANKPANZER, a pointlessly overtooled vehicle, especially a Cybertruck from Tesla.

BEN: Oh, wow.

DANIEL: Very Twitter words: nothing really stood out. There were no very Twitter words. The very Facebook words were CORNPLATING. CORNPLATING is when fans of a fandom really, really overthink and overexplain every detail. It was named because in an Encanto group somebody was thinking, I just noticed that Dolores is holding a plate of corn. It’s like, “Oh man, you are seriously cornplating this.”

BEN: You have dug too deep.

DANIEL: NOBIT was a very Facebook word. An obituary mistakenly published before the person in question has died, or some kind of announcement. INTERNATIONAL BLUE SCREEN DAY, when everyone’s Windows computers went down. Yeah, and then the very Discord words were CHE, the Argentine discourse particle. It’s like hey, or what’s up? Or focal marker, “Listen to the next thing I say.” CHE. And it’s in the news because it only got into the Spanish dictionary, the Real Academia Española this year. Only recently did it make it into that dictionary. And then, AURA. So, aura, I think really has some international legs there. Wait, that’s not Spanish.

Okay, now it’s time for number 10. And I just love to hear your comments, and also in chat. FOREVER CHEMICALS. Forever chemicals are chemicals that get into our bodies, build up and don’t decompose.

MIGNON: I feel like I’ve been hearing that for years.

BEN: Yeah. And I also feel like it would have been higher given… that felt like it was really talked about this year in particular. But yeah, I’m just a bit surprised that it didn’t land a little bit higher.

DANIEL: Yeah, me too. Maybe a lot of the attention was taken up by DISSOLVING ATLANTIC CURRENT. [LAUGHS UNENTHUSIASTICALLY]

BEN: True.

DANIEL: Number nine was BRAT.

BEN: Ayy.

DANIEL: Ayy.

BEN: Back again.

DANIEL: I guess now that we’re… Brat is so popular and it’s summer here… WE can have a brat summer. Ben!

BEN: No, I’m shutting that down straight away. Daniel does not need to have a brat summer.

DANIEL: Let’s have a brat summer!

BEN: Mm-mm. Nope.

DANIEL: We can get a…

MIGNON: Bright green shirt.

BEN: Daniel, stop it. I can… Whatever you’re doing right now, whatever you’re about to say…

DANIEL: I’m coming over.

BEN: No. Don’t do that. The last thing Perth needs is our pair of dad bods out there bratting it up. Not required.

DANIEL: With that Related or Not song played on a Bluetooth speaker in Hay Street Mall. I’m coming over.

BEN: Bad. Bad. All bad.

DANIEL: There’s a tie for seventh. Weird???

BEN: Oh, WEIRD.

DANIEL: Tell me about weird.

MIGNON: It definitely had its moment. Again, it was a big surge in WEIRD.

BEN: Remind me why we’re not talking about the normal use of the word WEIRD.

DANIEL: Well, we are.

BEN: No, no, I know, but like, obviously we’re not just memeing the word WEIRD. There was something that happened to do with the word WEIRD that I’m forgetting about. And I’m hoping lots of other listeners need my help remembering.

DANIEL: LordMortis, you can tell us.

LORDMORTIS: It was Tim Walz, right? Tim Walz said they’re just weird little guys. And there’s a podcast now, incidentally, Weird Little Guys. But yeah, this podcast, yeah… But it was basically used to describe JD Vance and a lot of people in that sort of MAGA sphere, and it sort of spread. And for a few weeks, it was like Democrats were using it and people on that sort of lefty side were basically using it to describe a lot of the ideas on the right with all sorts of stuff. But yeah, WEIRD.

DANIEL: I think that WEIRD is a wonderful discourse strategy because as we’ve seen on Blue-esky, dismissal is better than engagement. Just label it weird and get… And especially because as we talked about with Dr Nicole Holliday, here are people who don’t like being marginalised. In fascism, there’s an in group and an out group. The in group, they’re the ones who matter. And the out group doesn’t matter. Their votes, their rights, all those things don’t matter. And who the out group is depends on the conversation. But here are some people who are proclaiming themselves the in group. And then by labeling them weird, you say, “Eh, you’re out group.” And that’s very upsetting because they don’t want to be weird. They want to be normal. Their brand is normal.

BEN: There’s a few people in chat talking about the fact that it was a little bit of a flash in the pan and then it went away. And there’s some postulating in our chat box about how like maybe that could have helped and that sort of thing. I too remember that happening and I remember, in retrospect, what ended up being the false hope that it gave me that things were changing and that the tide was turning and there was some real momentum behind not Trump.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm.

BEN: But unfortunately, I personally… I love LordMortis so very much, but I’m going to disagree with him a little bit. I think they could have kept on the weird bandwagon the whole way along.

LORDMORTIS: No, no, I agree. I think that campaign got some very bad advice and that was one of the things that they messed up on, was not continuing to just highlight the weirdness of what is going on because it was the one way of maybe getting cut through, but now I’m getting political, so.

DANIEL: And how many different think pieces were there? “Stop calling Conservatives weird. Here’s why that’s bad for Democrats,” because it’s always: here’s why that’s bad for Democrats.

BEN: I’m just… My little piece would be, they could have flogged that horse until it was dead three times over, and I don’t think it would have actually made a difference, unfortunately. I think what we saw was there’s a whole bunch of Americans who were like, “I want that guy.”

DANIEL: That guy. Yeah, yeah, big time.

BEN: Yeah, unfortunately.

DANIEL: Thank you, LordMortis. And number seven also, SERVING CUNT, or I’m going to also include CUNTY. This is by no means, by no means a new one. This is not new at all. This has been from drag culture since at least 2011. It was new to me, and the use of CUNTY was so arresting and memorable that I decided to include it. And here we are, at number seven. Any feels?

MIGNON: I think being American, it is way more offensive to me than it is to people in Europe. So, I was kind of shocked to see it on the list.

BEN: We’ve spoken about this quite a few times, about how playful and desensitised this word tends to be in Australia. I think, Daniel, the combination of your American lineage and your ex-Mo lineage means this one probably for you still hits pretty hard. Even though you know, and you’re like, “It’s not that big a deal,” I suspect that there’s still a part of you that when you heard it, you were like… Oop! [MIMES SHOCK] That little like electric shock that happens because, yeah, as I was riding through America, I forgot sometimes, I lapsed. And there really is just like a… I struggle to think of a more taboo word than that word other than the N word and other really horrendous racial… that’s probably… Yeah, it’s real bad in America. It’s real, real bad.

DANIEL: Mignon?

MIGNON: Yeah, real bad.

DANIEL: Yeah.

BEN: [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: That’s all we got. There are a couple of things to say about it from an Australian perspective, and not just Australian English. I mean, it’s just a synonym for dude. Before he died, I got the chance to have an interview with Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit. And he was a lovely guy, and we talked about the word, and he said, “You can be a lovely cunt. You can be a sick cunt or whatever.” And for him, it was just dude. But I’ve also taught classes on swearing. And while we were happy to throw around FUCK and SHIT and stuff like that, the largely older attendees of my classes just could not get to that one. They could not get to the C word. It was the C word for the duration of the swearing class. So, to have it pop up like this…

BEN: That’s so funny, isn’t it?

DANIEL: Boom, it does. It still has the power to offend. Okay, let’s see. Number six. We’re getting number six. WANKPANZER. The Wankpanzer, a pointlessly large and overpowered 4×4 vehicle, in particular a Tesla Cybertruck.

MIGNON: That’s super fun. PANZER, is that in other combinations or words?

DANIEL: I haven’t seen PANZER used as a combining form.

LORDMORTIS: I’m pretty sure it’s because there’s German Panzer tanks, German Tiger tanks.

BEN: And so, all of those tanks will have different prefixes. So, there’s like Jagdpanzers and there’s… That’s the only one I know off the top of my head, but I know there’s quite a few.

DANIEL: And then, it’s always nice to see wanky used in context, so very good. Let’s see, we have a four-way tie for second. It was absolutely locked tight. So, here they are in no particular order. RAWDOGGING. I was hoping that would be number one.

BEN: [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Number one, taking a flight without indulging in entertainment or distraction. Originally having sex without a condom. But it’s in expanded use, I think engaging in an activity without using customary precaution. Like I didn’t wear a mask, I was just rawdogging the air.

BEN: This got applied to me the other day. Not the sexually…

DANIEL: What were you rawdogging?

BEN: I can’t… I was at work and one of my… I think I was like doing… I was writing some commentary or something like that and I wasn’t using AI and one of my colleagues, sort of jokingly kind of went, “Whoa, rawdogging the comments, mate. Whoa, that’s brutal.” I was just like, “Is that where we’re at?” Where if I just like write a thing, it’s considered rawdogging words? I don’t know.

MIGNON: Oh, my god. That’s wild.

DANIEL: And it’s another good example of something taboo becoming being used in a not taboo context although I think it’s for laughs, right? I mean.

BEN: Yeah. Oh, certainly like this was definitely designed to elicit a chuckle, for sure.

DANIEL: Definitely. All right. Also at second place, DEMURE, which we have talked about. So, I won’t go on about that one. Another one, THIRD SPACES. Kind of a surprise for me. Ben, you like this one.

BEN: Oh, I just. You will not stop me talking about third spaces, Daniel. You’re going to try and I won’t let you. I won’t bang on about it here because I’m sure all of the people currently sitting in this room and all of the people who will be listening to this show later have had enough of Ben talking about third spaces, so just a very, very quick summation. There is home, space number one. There is work, space number two. And then in a healthy, flourishing, community-oriented society that most of us would like to live in, there should be a whole bunch of third spaces.

In Australia, probably the single greatest example I can think of this would be the beach. A place where lots of different people from lots of different spaces and places can come and share that space, use it for multiple different activities, blah, blah, blah, blah. But one of the problems with contemporary society, especially in places like Canada, America, and Australia, like very suburban places, is there is a severe lack of third spaces in most people’s at least local environment. And we live a fairly disconnected and not particularly community-oriented life because of this lack of third spaces. And I’m done.

MIGNON: Amen.

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Woohoo.

MIGNON: Yeah. It always makes me think of coffee shops in Vienna, you know how the artists and writers would hang out in coffee shops, although I think wasn’t that because their apartments were so tiny and cold?

BEN: The New York effect. Yeah.

DANIEL: I went to an event by a couple of friends I know where they just set up a community event with games and stuff and invited me and it was really lovely. And I just got so much respect for people who are able to or who have the desire to build community in real life. And I found that in the moment, like, I had a really good time, I also found that it was hard for me to get back into doing people mode because online people are easy. You can leave them on read. And I really just enjoyed getting together with real people in a real place. So, my admiration for those friends of mine is off the charts.

Okay, our last second place one, which I think also could have been number one. AI SLOP.

BEN: Oh, yeah.

DANIEL: Or just SLOP. SLOP Or AI SLOP. Low-quality content made by generative AI technology. What are your feels on this one? Mignon, you want to go?

MIGNON: A source of enshittification, for sure. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Very much, very much.

MIGNON: It’s nice to have a word for it.

DANIEL: Slop. There it is like you go to Facebook… I go to Facebook and my feed is just about entirely content for eyeballs, slop.

BEN: Oh, yeah, it’s ugly out there.

DANIEL: It’s a bit of a problem.

MIGNON: It felt a little forced at me at first, like they were saying like, “Well, there’s spam and then there’s slop.” And it felt like people kind of trying to make that happen, but then it did because it really is so useful.

DANIEL: It’s a bit of a problem though, because it’s feeding back into the training data at the worst possible time before we’re good at detecting it. So now, it’s unfortunately going to be ensconced in our lives and enshittifying our information pipeline that we use to make decisions and do that stuff, so what a moment.

BEN: James in chat made a comment that I also wanted to make, which is sometimes it can be really hard to differentiate what is true AI slop and what is just awful cottage industry, like base, base, base meme generation, all that sort of stuff. Like basically, it’s the same thing that we’ve been struggling with at like a university level or a high school level, which is like, “How do we tell if it’s made by a person or not?” except at the opposite end of the quality spectrum. So how do we tell if this absolute garbage was made by AI or just people trying to generate clicks?

DANIEL: Mm-hmm, very much. Is it time? I think it might be time.

BEN: Okay, here we go.

DANIEL: It’s time for our Because Language 2024 Word of the Week of the Year. SANEWASHING. Sanewashing.

BEN: Wow.

DANIEL: I have feels about this.

BEN: I did not… colour me surprised.

DANIEL: Said of the media when it makes bizarre or dislocated public pronouncements seem normal and coherent.

MIGNON: I put out a call on my social media for like, “What do you think the Word of the Year is?” And a lot of people said SANEWASHING.

DANIEL: Wow. Okay. And I feel like a lot of us are feeling frustrated by… There’s this thing called normalcy bias where you see something really weird, but because it’s hard to tell weird stuff from normal stuff, and because normal stuff is just so much more common and normal, we mislabel everything as normal, even when it’s really, really weird. But I think a lot of us are getting frustrated by normalcy bias on the part of traditional gatekeepers who translate like bizarre, disjointed rantings by, say, politicians into normal-seeming prose. So, there’s a frustration there.

BEN: Yeah. Much like AI slop, this seems like a thing that is definitely filling a void we require. Like, we need a word for this thing that we can kind of feel and sense and intuit happening around us. So, for that reason, I think it’s a very appropriate sort of… It certainly belongs in the list of like top three or four. I haven’t come across it though all that much, I will say, as in, like, I heard it and I heard about it. But by this logic, vibe for me I would have come across way, way, way, way more.

DANIEL: Yeah, maybe.

MIGNON: If you follow US politics online, you hear sanewashing a lot.

BEN: Okay. Okay.

MIGNON: Yeah.

DANIEL: Okay. Then, I expect that we’ll probably see this one in the American Dialect Society Word of the Year coming up. I said at the time I’m not crazy about it because I’m really trying to avoid ableist language like CRAZY and INSANE. I am pleased to see the -WASHING combining form. That was pretty cool. Hedvig at the time pointed out that maybe these words like INSANE and CRAZY have kind of reached a point where they no longer apply to the original thing and now they have become their own thing like, “This chocolate pudding you made is insane.”

BEN: What’s the word for that, the treadmill?

DANIEL: Amelioration. Oh, we’re talking about the euphemism…, sorry.

MIGNON: Is it semantic bleaching?

DANIEL: The euphemism cycle. There’s a euphemism cycle. And I’ll stick in the comments the linguist who came up with it, many years before a certain white-haired cognitive scientist.

BEN: So, this is the idea that once upon a time, the word DOLT was a genuinely polite attempt to describe a person with intellectual disabilities, but then it became an insult. So then, they moved on to something like moron that became an insult, and they moved on to something like idiot that became… And then we get to, I’m going to use the R word now. And to some degree still in literature is like sort of official designation for a person with intellectual disabilities, but because we keep using them as an insult, we have to move on to the next thing. And it sort of sounds like Hedvig was suggesting that’s kind of maybe what’s happening to like crazy and that sort of stuff. Like, we’re moving past it. I don’t know though. I do sort of given how prevalently a concept like sane and sanity is still used as genuine medical diagnostic criteria, I don’t know if we’re there yet.

DANIEL: No, I don’t think so either. And even if we were, it’s kind of weird to me, like, “Oh, well, if there’s an offensive term, just keep using it until it’s okay.”

BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s not how that works.

DANIEL: Oh, dear.

BEN: At least not often.

DANIEL: I was hoping that HOPECORE would do better.

BEN: Oh, yeah.

DANIEL: Wouldn’t that have been nice?

MIGNON: Yeah.

DANIEL: We’ve been focusing, especially in our last episode with Dr Gerald Roche, about how hope needs to be cultivated. We need to cultivate the quiet courage of the everyday. But unfortunately, it’s in short supply. Joy was canceled this year, that didn’t happen. So, that was something that I really liked and I feel like it didn’t make it. But sane washing, the Because Language Word of the Week of the Year. Thanks to everybody who voted. Any final thoughts?

BEN: Good year. Good year for words. A lot of cool stuff out there.

DANIEL: It was a bit of an off year.

MIGNON: Yeah, A lot of fun. There are years in the past… I think last year was really AI heavy and a few years before that was really pandemic heavy. This year feels a little more like of a mix, which is fun.

BEN: There were several terrible things happening this year. So, we’ve got quite a few options to choose from.

MIGNON: [LAUGHS] True.

DANIEL: Well, I would just like to give a special thanks to Mignon Fogarty. Mignon, how can people find ya?

MIGNON: Just listen to the Grammar Girl podcast. That’s the best place to find me.

DANIEL: Very good.

BEN: Do people even listen to that show, Mignon?

MIGNON: [LAUGHS]

BEN: That’s a callback. If Daniel leaves that in the show, I’m not just being a prick, I swear.

DANIEL: Listen, you have to listen to the whole thing in context. And thanks to our wonderful audience, listeners and friends. Thanks to everybody who gave suggestions this year and to all of our guests for the year. Thanks to all the Speechdorks at SpeechDocs.

BEN: Oh, no, don’t.

DANIEL: You know, I’m surprised that it actually took me this long to come up with that. They transcribed all the words so that everybody can read our show as well as listen to our show and watch our show. Maybe you can do all three at the same time. And of course, big thanks to our patrons who keep the show going. All right, Ben.

BEN: I’m just… I’m pointing at all of the different patrons in our window.

DANIEL: And you, and you, and you.

BEN: Yeah. If you do like our show, there are a few things that you can do that would help us out. You can follow us on all of the various places we are @becauseangpod in all of the bits and pieces. But Daniel is really enjoying Bluesky, so you should check us out there if you want…

DANIEL: This isn’t about me. [LAUGHS]

BEN: It kind of is though, Daniel, if we’re being honest, because most of the time when we talk to listeners, they’re like, “I love that Daniel Midgley guy. He’s so great.” So go and talk to Daniel on Bluesky. If you want to chat to us, as in like literally have us hear your voice, please leave us a SpeakPipe message. You can find that link on our website. Or you can email us, classic, old school, very demure, very nice, hello@becauselanguage.com. Or the very funnest of all of the ways is just tell a mate about our podcast and be like, “You should check these Speechdorks out.”

DANIEL: You can also become a patron. Patrons help us by making sure that we have a little bit of money to compensate our guests, to pay the bills, to keep the website going and to do fun stuff that we really like to do. Depending on your level, you get live episodes like this one, bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts, and access to our Discord community. I would just like to give a special shoutout to our patrons at the Supporter level. You know, I’ve been mixing it up a little bit. Not just reading alphabetically like I always used to, been doing it new. So this time, we are ordering our supporters by how uncommon the letters in your name are. What’s the most common letter in English?

BEN: E, A?

DANIEL: Yes, it’s E.

BEN: Okay, okay.

DANIEL: So, if your name were all E’s, you’d have the, the highest score and if your name were all Z’s, you would come last if we were doing this in English, but we’re not.

BEN: Oh, Jesus.

DANIEL: We’re using letter frequency stats for Finnish. That’s right. The most Finnishly probable names, as always divided by the number of letters because a long name would get, of course, a higher score. All right, the most Finnishly likely name on our list was Stan, lots and lots of normal Finnish letters. Most common letter A, surprisingly. Then, Kate, Elías, Matt, Nasrin, Joanna, Steele, Nikoli. I am here at this point. Alyssa, Kevin, Keith, Ariaflame, Rhian, Laura, who just upgraded from Listener to Supporter. Thanks, Laura. Manú, Rene, Ayesha, Luis, Helen, Nigel. Now we’re getting into some Finnishly improbable names, Amir, Ignacio, PharaohKatt, Tony, Lyssa. Mignon, you’re here at this point, Colleen, Kathy, Whitney, Aldo, and Ben you’re here, it’s the B.

BEN: Oh, wow.

DANIEL: It’s dragging you down man.

BEN: Hmm.

DANIEL: Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ. Basically, any W’s, F, B, G, or C. Those are the least common letters in Finnish, so Felicity, Andy, O Tim, aengryballs, Margareth, Kristofer, gramaryen, Amy, Sonic Snejhog, [WITH BEN] LordMortis, Diego, Rachel, Meredith, Termy, sæ̃m, Tadhg, Canny Archer, Jack, Larry, Andy from Logophilius, lot’s of uncommon letters there. Molly Dee, Hedvig, the G and the D are dragging her down, that’s just for reference. Chris L, J0HNTR0Y, Rodger, Chris W, and last of all Wolfdog, with a W, F and G. And our latest patrons at the Listener level, John K and John M. And our new free patrons, Sonja, Cameron, and Don.

Mignon, I’m sticking in chat your last bit. I want you to give this a try.

MIGNON: What? Okay.

DANIEL: You get the honor of reading the very last bit.

MIGNON: Oh, my gosh, That’s a hard name. Okay. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov [LAUGHS]

BEN: Daniel, you’re a mean, mean man.

MIGNON: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.

DANIEL: Wow, you’re a pro.

BEN: That was really impressive.

DANIEL: You’re the OG. You’re the OG ling commer. You know this, don’t you?

MIGNON: But I can’t read names. [LAUGHTER] It’s almost as bad as Irish. Well, you know, I’ve got a show. I’ve got a script. Suddenly, there’s an Irish word and I break out into a cold sweat. You know? Yeah.

BEN: Oh, yeah. It’s all over. Like a flop sweat.

MIGNON: Anyway, thank you.

BEN: Someone in chat makes the… here’s another, like, inside baseball moment for people listening later. Someone in the chat has acknowledged that in our little script that Daniel copy pasted into chat for Mignon, he has put the IPA pronunciation help for Ryan Beno, but he hasn’t put it in for Drew Krapljanov, which is just awful. Why, Daniel? Why?

DANIEL: I thought it would be obvious.

[LAUGHTER]

MIGNON: I guess it is in retrospect.

BEN: Monster. Monster.

MIGNON: I don’t have my glasses on either. It’s tiny.

[BOOP]

BEN: To keep everyone just sort of entertained while we wait, I would like to share a fact, and this is the like, least cool way to do this, because I’m sharing a Hank Green fact that I just saw, which is basically, I would say three quarters of the people in this room right now probably already know this, but it blew my mind so hard.

So, someone basically asked about petrichor which, if anyone is unfamiliar, is that smell that comes after rain or like during rain, especially rain that happens into dry soil. And they studied it. It’s a relatively recent word. I didn’t realise that. I figured it would be one of those things that some Renaissance man came up with, but it’s not. It’s from like the 1960s apparently. And they realised or when they studied it, they found out that petrichor is sort of created by this thing that’s in the soil. And when the water hits the soil, it gets thrown up into the air or like aerosolised with water droplets. And then, the water droplets pop and we can smell it, but here’s the interesting thing.

DANIEL: That was pretty interesting.

BEN: Whoa, whoa. This is the preamble, mate. Wait until we get to the body text. Check this out. We can smell this substance, which I think is called like geosmin. We can smell this substance better than any other thing basically in the world. We can detect geosmin in the order of 5 parts per trillion. We normally smell things at parts per million or parts per billion. Parts per trillion is like dog level smell ability. And we have this ability to smell this thing to that degree and no one really knows why. They’ve postulated that it might be because it helps us find water. Maybe at some point in our evolutionary history that smell signifies some kind of a water source maybe. But yeah, I was listening to this fact and then I turned to my partner just because I suspected that was pretty wild. And then, I was like, hey, because she’s a doctor, “If someone can smell something in like parts per trillion, that’s crazy, right?” And she’s like, “We can’t do that.” I was like, “Well, Hank Green says so.” And she’s like, “Whoa, that’s wild.” So, the doctor says it’s crazy. That’s how you know it’s crazy.

DANIEL: That’s pretty crazy.

BEN: Yeah.

DANIEL: And why would we… yeah, why would we be so good at that? I guess finding water. I don’t even think that we smell smoke at that level of sensitivity.

BEN: No, not even remotely close, I don’t think.

DANIEL: And smelling smoke is really useful. Really good thing, to be honest.

MIGNON: And petrichor is only when it rains. So, it wouldn’t find water after a month of no rain. Wouldn’t help you find water in a drought.

BEN: The only thing I can imagine is maybe you can also detect a faint petrichor odor at like creeks or other like bubbling waterfall-y cascade-y… I’m not sure. But yeah. And yeah, the main point is we don’t actually know… We haven’t got a good answer for why we can smell it to that degree.

DANIEL: Well, that’s just bonkers. Thank you, Ben.

BEN: I’ve done my due. So, I can go? Like, we’re done here.

DANIEL: No, no, no.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

111: Words of the Week of the Year 2024 (live with Mignon Fogarty and friends)

Timestamps

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Show notes

Collins: brat

Australian National Dictionary Centre: Colesworth

Cambridge: manifest

Macquarie: enshittification

Dictionary.com: demure

The Economist: kakistocracy

Oxford University Press: brain rot

Merriam-Webster: polarisation

German youth: aura

Brazil: ansiedade (anxiety)

Hawaiian: Mākia (aim, motto, purpose)

Japan: Fute hodo

The BL Word of the Week of the Year

Transcript

Pages

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111: Words of the Week of the Year 2024 (live with Mignon Fogarty and friends)

Timestamps

Watch this episode

Listen to this episode

Video promo

Patreon supporters

Show notes

Collins: brat

Australian National Dictionary Centre: Colesworth

Cambridge: manifest

Macquarie: enshittification

Dictionary.com: demure

The Economist: kakistocracy

Oxford University Press: brain rot

Merriam-Webster: polarisation

German youth: aura

Brazil: ansiedade (anxiety)

Hawaiian: Mākia (aim, motto, purpose)

Japan: Fute hodo

The BL Word of the Week of the Year

Transcript

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113: “Official” English (with Carmen Fought)

112: WotY 2024: The Last Word (with Kelly Wright)

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