The public has voted, and a winner has been decided! We’re looking all the words chosen by the various dictionary bodies, and counting down our Words of the Week of the Year.
And there’s a very special interview with author, blogger, activist, and inventor of words Cory Doctorow.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
The Collins Word of the Year 2023 Is… AI
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/woty
AI named word of the year by Collins Dictionary
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67271252
The Matildas waltz in as Australia’s Word of the Year
https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/the-matildas-waltz-in-as-australia’s-word-of-the-year
‘Matilda’ named Australia’s 2023 word of the year in nod to Tillies’ triumphs
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/nov/15/matilda-australia-2023-word-of-the-year-womens-world-cup
Did you have a choccie bickie this arvo? A quantitative look at Australian hypocoristics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0388000110000987
Waltzing Matilda by A B Paterson, D Digby
https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780207170980/waltzing-matilda/
waltzing Matilda: to waltz Matilda | Meanings and Origins of Australian Words and Idioms
https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/andc/meanings-origins/w
[PDF] OzWords, May 1999: Chasing Our Unofficial Anthem: Who Was Matilda? Why Did She Waltz?
https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/andc/Ozwords%20May%201999.pdf
The Dictionary.com Word of the Year is hallucinate.
https://content.dictionary.com/word-of-the-year-2023/
Dictionary.com’s word of the year is a common one. But it doesn’t mean what you think https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/12/us/dictionary-2023-word-hallucinate-cec/index.html
Cambridge Dictionary names ‘Hallucinate’ Word of the Year 2023
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cambridge-dictionary-names-hallucinate-word-of-the-year-2023
‘Hallucinate’ chosen as Cambridge dictionary’s word of the year
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/15/hallucinate-cambridge-dictionary-word-of-the-year
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year definitely wasn’t picked by AI
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/27/1215372795/merriam-webster-word-of-the-year-2023-authentic
Announcing the Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year 2023
https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/blog/article/913/
Cozzie livs: light-hearted term for cost-of-living crisis named Macquarie dictionary word of the year
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/28/cozzie-livs-light-hearted-term-for-cost-of-living-crisis-named-macquarie-dictionary-word-of-the-year
Oxford Word of the Year 2023
https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2023/
Rizz, the word of the year, explained
https://www.vox.com/culture/23989120/rizz-definition-oxford-word-of-the-year-colloquial
In gloomy mood, Germany picks ‘crisis mode’ as word of the year
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/gloomy-mood-germany-picks-crisis-mode-word-year-2023-12-08/
“Are”, la palabra del año 2023 en Japón
https://www.nippon.com/es/japan-topics/c03836/
Talk of taxes spurs choice for Japan’s kanji of the year
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/12/12/japan/japan-kanji-of-2023/
GPT è la parola dell’anno in Svizzera
https://www.rsi.ch/info/svizzera/GPT-è-la-parola-dell’anno-in-Svizzera–2002138.html
“Décombres” est le mot de l’année 2023 pour la Suisse romande
https://www.rts.ch/info/culture/14504928-decombres-est-le-mot-de-lannee-2023-pour-la-suisse-romande.html
‘Monsterbank’ and ‘rubble’ named Swiss Words of the Year
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/-monsterbank–and–rubble–named-swiss-words-of-the-year/49012914
Euskaltzaindia and UZEI choose “zerrenda” as the Basque word of the year
https://www.lavanguardia.com/local/paisvasco/20231215/9453582/euskaltzaindia-uzei-eligen-zerrenda-palabra-euskera-ano-agenciaslv20231215.amp.html
[PDF] Hostile Epistemology by C. Thi Nguyen
https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUHEL.pdf
Wikipedia Editor Who First Noted Henry Kissinger’s Death Has Become an ‘Instant Legend’
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9qeb/wikipedia-editor-who-first-noted-henry-kissingers-death-has-become-an-instant-legend
Enshittification | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Social Quitting | Cory Doctorow
https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456
When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/
On Bullshit | Harry G. Frankfurt
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right | Atul Gawande
https://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/
Bonus supplementary material
Study: Why Wikipedia is the Last Good Website | Rebecca Watson
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Ben, you ready?
BEN: I am most ready.
DANIEL: Everyone else, you ready? Okay, cool.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to this very special live episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. He’s my podcasting partner for going on 13 years. [CHUCKLES] He’s the man I love. It’s Ben Ainslie. Hi, Ben.
BEN: I like that. The man I love. I hope we can make that true in some sort of on-the-down-low sense where there’s an illicit love affair that has been going on for far too long. We must tell people, Daniel!
DANIEL: Have I not said that we’ll know that we’ve really made it when we start seeing slash fiction?
BEN: Mm! Mhm.
DANIEL: When people start shipping us…
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: …that’s how you know.
BEN: When there’s a significant AO3 presence of Daniel and Ben, that’s when you know you’ve really cracked into the cultural zeitgeist.
DANIEL: And I don’t mind that. Although we’ve been very clear about our chemistry, so that’s not an issue.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It’s not “Will they? Won’t they?” It’s like, “How many times will they?”
DANIEL: How many times? And when you say how many times, you’re talking about how many times we’ve done one of these Word of the Year shows… Word of the Week of the Year shows. I think we’ve done like nine or ten.
BEN: That was a stupendous segue out of verdant sexual congress into what the show is doing. That was very impressive. You’re maestro, a wizard, sir.
DANIEL: That was really awkward, but I… I managed to turn it around. I don’t think anybody noticed! Our pal, Hedvig, will not be here for this one, sadly, because like five minutes ago, she was like, “I am super-duper sick, and I cannot make it.” And I said, “Hedvig, we love you. It will be fine. You get better, and we will… The important thing is your health. So, you just take it easy.” So, she’s just taking it easy, but we’re going to miss her.
BEN: Joke’s on her. This is one of the, like, three shows a year that we’ve actually conducted at a time that suits her. So, it’s like the afternoon in Germany, and Hedvig: #notamorningpersonusually. And she always gets stuck with 9am shows. So, sorry, Hedders, this is one of the three actually nice for you shows that you can’t do. I feel really bad for you.
DANIEL: Everybody get onto Discord and just pelt her with lovely get-well messages. After this episode.
So, what’s coming up in this episode? We’re looking at all the Words of the Week of the Year. We’re looking at all the Words of the Year from everyone who releases a Word of the Year. We’ve got dictionary bodies, lexicography bodies in English and in other languages. But we’re also going to be counting down our Words of the Week of the Year. Our listeners and our friends have voted, and we’ll be hashing out those results. Ah, makes me feel good.
BEN: Who can wait? You’ve all got all of your seats, but you’ll only need their edge. I think I used that in a previous… Someone who’s working through all of the years in a row would be like, “Ugh, Ben, you hack.”
DANIEL: That’s why you have transcripts. How many times has Ben made that joke?
BEN: [LAUGHS] Noo! That’s a terrible use of money, making me look stupid.
DANIEL: This episode comes in audio format and also video on YouTube. If you’re listening on audio, that’s great. But you can also swap over to video on YouTube because you’ll be able to see us and you’ll be able to see all the messages and reactions that are happening in chat, which is fun. If you’re watching us on YouTube, maybe think about throwing us a like so that the almighty algorithm will show us to more people. Let’s see. We are joined by a good many patrons. I want to hear…
BEN: A gaggle.
DANIEL: Where are you coming from tonight? Where is everybody? Do you want to just tell us where you are? Drop it in chat and we’ll read some out, because that’s fun.
BEN: We’ve got at least… what’s 5×5? 25. We’ve got at least 25. And there’s another page, apparently, but Zoom doesn’t do pages in a way that makes sense to me. So, I think there’s like another column. So, there’s maybe 30.
DANIEL: Natheniel checking in from Hong Kong. Annika from Boston, that’s early. Cass, you’re in New Mexico, that’s even earlier. Prize for Diego in LA, he’s on the Worst Coast. It’s the coast that I love, but I’ve got to say, it’s the hardest one to get right for these shows. Copenhagen for Magdalena. Termy from Melbourne. Who are my Perth people? We’ve got PharaohKatt right here, and Ariaflame in Boorloo. Nigel in Miami. Ben, take over!
BEN: Oh, sorry. Yes. We’ve got Münster, which I am absolutely sure that I pronounced correctly and definitely won’t get in trouble for. We’ve got someone checking… We got Louise checking in from Ontario, which is great. Southwest Washington state. I really like, Colleen, that you specified Southwest, because the Northwest, Northeast, and Southeast can all die in a hole, apparently. The Southwest though.
DANIEL: Wait a minute. I happen to come from a small town in Eastern Washington, and I can tell you that it can definitely die in a hole.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Why does everyone from Spokane hate Spokane so much? It is unreal.
DANIEL: If I had time, I would run and get a T-shirt that I got last time I was in Spokane. It says “Spokane: We Tried.” I just… I loved that energy. We’ve got Aaron in Troy, Michigan. We’ve got… I can’t read everybody. Cara from Oregon, you win the prize, very good. So many… Lissa from Perth. Ah, so good to have all of you. Also, thank you to all the Australian Eastern staters for being here. It’s great to see you.
All right, well, let’s see. I just like to say thanks to all you patrons. You’re able to join us on this live episode because you are patrons, and that’s just one of the perks that you get from being a patron. What else we got? Discord?
BEN: Discord is great. Not that we need to sell it to the people who are currently here, because obviously they’re all from the Discord, which is a great community. But if you’re listening to this later, all of the cool kids are there, and so you should be there too.
DANIEL: Our annual mailout is coming as well. So, bit of housekeeping. I’ve ordered a few of the items, going to be tucking them into little envelopes soon. Postcards, stickers, including the new one, the etymology sticker which Aristemo granted us, and I have turned it into artwork and that’s coming. Some more surprises. If you want the package, make sure that Patreon has your mailing address. There are lots of patrons for whom that field is empty and that’s too bad, because I’ve got no idea how to get the annual mailout to you, and you’re going to want it because it’s really fun. And if you are watching this and you’re not a patron, there’s still time. Go to patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: Get all the goodies.
DANIEL: All right, you ready to get those words?
BEN: I am, I am frothing for the words. Frothing!
DANIEL: Okay. We’re going to start with the ones from other dictionary bodies, and it always seems to be Collins that starts out. They kind of go early, and they chose one that I thought was going to be a big one, and it was. It’s AI.
BEN: Yeah, okay. It is the safe bet. It’s a real safe bet.
DANIEL: Yeah. This one was based on a committee pick. They get together and they say what should be the word, and they chose AI.
Ever since ChatGPT came out in November of 2022, so a little over a year ago, people have been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence which, as we know from our episode with Emily Bender back in, I think, July or August, artificial intelligence doesn’t exist. Software is not intelligent. It’s just doing patterns and we’re doing patterns, but we’re also doing extra stuff, but it can do seemingly intelligent and useful things. But of course, we’ve got to watch out for those things that it can do and not over-rely on it. So, AI, that’s the one from Collins.
Now, the one from the Australian National Dictionary Centre was MATILDA. Ben, why?
BEN: Because of our national female soccer team. Although I’ve got to be honest, it does feel like now we should probably clarify in the opposite direction. In Australia, when you’re talking about the national soccer team, it is a really good bet that you’re probably talking about the female team, so we should probably start going, “Oh, yeah, the Australian male soccer team,” the whoevers… I don’t actually know their name, not because I’m trying to be all alternative because I’m not a sport guy.
DANIEL: Oh, I don’t know them.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I actually don’t. Someone in the chat tell us. The Socceroos. There we go.
DANIEL: It’s LordMortis, the Socceroos. That’s LordMortis.
BEN: Thank you. And, yeah, there really was… For listeners outside of Australia, there really was a kind of moment in Australia during the World Cup where the soccer team that was participating in the World Cup, the Matildas — or the Tillies, as they are affectionately referred to here — they had a moment. They arrived, culturally speaking. And when I say they arrived, obviously, they’ve been doing really hard work for a really long time. They didn’t, like, just arrive, but they’ve certainly arrived in popular consciousness. And so, that is not surprising to me, the Matildas or the Tillies, which one did they go with? Was it Matildas or Tillies?
DANIEL: It is the Matildas, but colloquially the Tillies because, of course, we Australians love our hypocoristics, we love to add -IE on the ends of our things.
BEN: Or -O depending on the thing. But the Tillos just sounds wrong.
DANIEL: Now, have we discussed that one? I’m sure we’ve discussed it on a different episode.
BEN: I feel that we have.
DANIEL: We have -IE endings and we have -O endings, and the -IE endings are for affectionate things, It’s the lovables, whereas -O is for the unlovables. So, if you’re a muso having a smoko, there’s something a little bit, mm, you know, disreputable.
BEN: I feel like that’s an imperfect explanation that doesn’t jigsaw with my own cultural understandings of my peoples.
DANIEL: All right, fine. That’s cool. Let me just give you a test though. Would you rather meet with your rellies or with your rellos?
BEN: Yeah, but you don’t… I mean, first of all, if it’s my family, this is a whole different thing, okay. But second of all, second of all…
DANIEL: Bad example.
BEN: …the traino, the bottle-o, these are not bad things. These are fine things.
DANIEL: I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying when something is an -O… one way to look at it is lovables versus unlovables. But another way is: the -O denotes sort of toughness or roughness or maybe masculinity or things like that.
BEN: Okay. Then you got like sparkies and chippies, but I guess that’s affectionate. I don’t know, I don’t know. We’ll get bogged down in this one, and we’ll forget about all the words. Daniel.
DANIEL: All right, fine. Let’s talk instead about Waltzing Matilda. We’ve all heard the song, Waltzing Matilda.
BEN: Ah, well, perhaps not everyone listening has potentially heard it.
DANIEL: Go ahead. Sing.
BEN: I can very much imagine there’s a bunch of people outside Australia being like: the what now? Matilda of the who?
DANIEL: Ben, would you please be the cultural interpreter for those people and tell us about Waltzing Matilda.
BEN: I tell you what, in fact, in fact… Okay, give me 15 seconds, because I’m right adjacent to my son’s room. Hold on.
DANIEL: Ben…? What are you doing? We’re going to bring the youngs… going to bring the next generation into this.
BEN: I did it, I did it, I did it. I’m back, I’m back.
DANIEL: What’d you do?
BEN: I have in my hand a children’s book, which is blurred out because of my stupid background stuff, which is the Waltzing Matilda song, which was, and I have proof…
DANIEL: Yes?
BEN: …given to me when I was a child, not my son.
DANIEL: My goodness.
BEN: So, this is how Australiana this shit is. So, we’re talking in the tender days of the late ’80s, and it’s all like Australian oil paintings. So, every line of the song is just like that sort of action. It’s not working very well, sorry. There we go.
DANIEL: Oh, there’s the swagman. [SINGING] Once a blurry swagman camped by a billabong.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I’ve even got, yeah, yeah. [SINGING] Once a swagman camped by a billabong under the shade of coolabah tree. And he sang he looked at his old billy boiling. You’ll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me. So, that’s the song and it goes on like that.
DANIEL: How do you go waltzing Matilda with someone?
BEN: I think because this book actually has a back bit that explains it all. It’s like: you carry a swag, which is a bedroll in Australian parlance. And so back in the day, when people, transient workers, were moving from farm to farm or station to station, they’d chuck their… Like, it’s hobo stuff, right? You’d chuck your bedroll on your shoulder, and you’d walk down the road looking for work. And apparently, that was waltzing Matilda. The Matilda was the swag.
DANIEL: That’s right. Matilda was your swag. That is absolutely correct. And because it was your sleeping partner, it was the thing that you had to keep you warm at night. We also see MARIA in this kind of usage. Banjo Paterson, the author of the poem/song, once wrote, “So, we shouldered our Matildas and we turned our back on town.” You could shoulder your Matilda, you could Matilda up. If you were a vagrant or an itinerant worker, you could be a Matilda carrier, Matilda lumper, a Matilda man, or a Matilda waltzer. And why waltzing? This is a little speculative, but it could be that with so many German immigrants, they were using a German word, WALZE, which means having a wander, the kind of wander that you have, again which means “auf die Walz zu gehen”, to go a-wandering. So, it’s possible that this is a mishearing. The WALTZ is a mishearing of the German verb WALZE. And I’ll take correction. If you’re in Germany, please unmute and let me know.
BEN: We’ve got actually a couple of people who can weigh in on this one.
DANIEL: Please do.
BEN: If no one from Germany wants to answer that question, maybe I’ll ask this. Does the German word, is that not where we get the name for the music, the style of music, to waltz?
DANIEL: Don’t know. Don’t have access to a German etymological dictionary.
BEN: Surely. Surely! It’s so, so close.
DANIEL: Ben, we’ve seen lots of close words.
BEN: Yeah, that’s true. Neighbours does not mean cousins.
DANIEL: So, up the Tillies! That was a great part of Australian history.
BEN: That was a lovely moment. It really felt like everyone was in on it.
DANIEL: When you say “UP THE sports team,” you’re actually saying, “GO THE sports team” or “COME ON sports team.” So, that’s all that is. Okay, the next one, dictionary.com in Cambridge chose the same word, and it was HALLUCINATE.
BEN: Oh, is this also AI?
DANIEL: It is. What did you know about this one?
BEN: [LAUGHS] This is just… As I’m sure… look, anyone who has played with some of the AI stuff, whether it’s the image stuff or the text stuff, has probably come across this. I know I certainly have. It just makes stuff up sometimes. It just completely confects things that do not exist.
DANIEL: Oo, I like that word, CONFECT. I’m going to put that on my list. You see, here’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to make a list of words that are better than HALLUCINATE because, as you know from the episode once again with Dr Emily Bender…
BEN: [LAUGHS] I see what you mean, yeah.
DANIEL: You can’t… Computers can’t hallucinate. And Annika points out quite rightly that Ben used this last time — I sort of let it go — but hallucinating implies a mental state, and computers don’t have them. So, there’s a hunt on to try to get a better word than HALLUCINATE. I found this tweet from EnglishOER, it’s someone named Anna who says, who posts, “Not hallucination, not fabrication, not confabulation.” That’s a shame, because I liked CONFABULATE. I liked that one. They continue. “We need a word for when LLMs make things up. The word shouldn’t imply conscious experience or intent. Discussion with…” other person “helped me find one candidate, concoction.” Concoct. I think concoct is… But that’s still a bit agenty, isn’t it? I liked CONFECT. I still like CONFABULATE. I like them both.
BEN: I imagine if you actually look up CONFECT, I’ve probably used it wrong.
DANIEL: But it’s sweet and tasty like candy. Ariaflame is correct. Well…
BEN: CONFABULATE and CONCOCT also have a similar vibe for me of, like, mental images. Both of them, I just see like a hunched-over wizard man surrounded by lots of bottles and ingredients. Those are those sorts of words. Do you know what I mean?
DANIEL: Yeah. This is hard because we’re not good at coming up with verbs that are agentless because we don’t live in an agentless world, or we’re very quick to impute agency to anything. Random happenstance things. So, it just doesn’t show up in our verbs and so it’s really hard to find one that’s good.
BEN: What about LIEBERG? Like a large language model just calves lie-bergs, much like a glacier does.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And then they calve. They calve and splash into our information ecosystem ocean. That’s all right. I love the suggestions that are coming up. Okay, thank you all in chat. Let’s go to the next one. Merriam-Webster has their Word of the Year, AUTHENTIC, based on lookups. A lot of people are looking up AUTHENTIC this year.
BEN: Based on… Okay, so is this also an AI thing? Are we in a stage now where all of the words are even responses to AI?
DANIEL: It sure seems that way, doesn’t it?
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: I think that we’re trying to figure out what’s real and what’s synthetic. Which is why if you get an email from me, you’ll see something at the bottom of my signature. It says, “This email was written by a human. No synthetic text.” And that’s my way of saying you…
BEN: That’s exactly what a machine would say.
DANIEL: Oh, sure you would. Well, people deserve to know. And so, this is my way of sort of saying, “For the record, I’m real.”
Okay, let’s go on to the next one. Macquarie Dictionary, that’s an Aussie dictionary. They have chosen… Oh, and we know some of the people on the committee as well. For example, Tiger Webb, one of our pals who’s been on an episode. David Astle, who is a crossword constructor.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: Yeah, David Astle is great. He’s also the word guy from Letters and Numbers, if you watch that on SBS. Anyway, they and other people on the committee chose COZZIE LIVS.
BEN: COZZIE LIVS.
DANIEL: COZZIE LIVS.
BEN: What am I not following here?
DANIEL: Oh, we’ve forgotten that one since the last time this came. The cost of living.
BEN: Of course, it is, of course it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like a MENTY-B, that sort of a vibe.
DANIEL: A MENTY-B, a LOCKY-D. We saw a couple of years ago with the Queen of England. She had her PLATTY JUBES, Platinum Jubilee. The committee says, “Although COZZIE LIVS was coined in the UK, it has resonated soundly with Australians with its ‘-IE’ suffix and its clipped formation, reminiscent of MENTY-B and LOCKY-D. And what could be a more Australian approach to a major social and economic problem than to treat it with a bit of humor and informality?” What do you reckon, Ben?
BEN: Yeah, that checks out. I’m surprised to hear that it was British in its construction because that reads and feels very Australian.
DANIEL: It does. And yet, it’s also pretty British if you’re familiar with that construction. It feels to me… Here’s my take. It feels like they thought the template was interesting, like it’s an interesting way of constructing a phrase. So, they wanted to highlight that, but they also wanted to pick an example that meant something that they wanted. You can’t just pick any weird example. You’ve got to pick something that you want to communicate, so they went with COZZIE LIVS. I kind of wish that they had gone with GENDY NOOCH.
BEN: [LAUGHS] NOOCH. There is something… I don’t know. I shudder just a little bit with the shortening to NOOCH. It feels dirty, I don’t know why. Maybe just because it sounds like GOOCH? I don’t know. But it’s… GENDY NOOCH just has [MAKES CRINGING NOISES] something going on there. Now, to be clear…!
DANIEL: Not the actual concept!
BEN: Yeah, gender neutrality: not gross at all! That’s an amazing, great thing in the world.
DANIEL: That’s a great thing.
BEN: Like, I have no issue with that. But GENDY NOOCH, I don’t know. Ugh.
DANIEL: It’s the NOOCH ending.
BEN: Hey, if people can have an issue with the word MOIST, which I maintain is a really important word for a couple of usages and there is no good replacement and people get all bent out of shape about that, then I get to be funny about NOOCH.
DANIEL: Hmm. Okay, you can. You took MOIST well, so we’ll give you this one. It’s interesting how this gets formed. You know the first part, the GENDY or the MENTY or whatever, it’s two syllables, the last one is always an -IE, an /i/ sound. And then, the second part is always one syllable, but it’s super variable. It could end with a “z” sound, like COZZIE LIVS, PLATTY JUBES, CORRY BOBS for the coronation. By the way, I like to call all of these things CORRY BOBS, that’s the name that I’m trying to get started. So, it could end in a /z/ sound, but it could also sound like /i/, like MENTY-B, LOCKY-D and so on. Hmm. So, it’s interesting. It’s an interesting choice in a number of ways, and I would expect nothing less from that particular team. Okay.
BEN: The comment section is popping off, by the way, and I agree with PharaohKatt. How else do you refer to a really well-made cake? That’s mine.
DANIEL: Yep. Magistra Annie asks, what’s the BOB in CORRY BOBS? And I can’t figure that one out. I mean, CORONATION, it sounds like you shortened it down to coronation, but you’re not Australian, so you can’t just stop with CORRIE. You’ve got to add something to complete the template. And so, it sounds from this, BOB is just some sort of placeholder, just some sort of filler or some kind of default ending. But I have… [CHUCKLES] Annika says GENDIE BOBS.
BEN: It’s like the end of gene pool spinoff thing. It feels like the productive usage is now just dissolving into its constituent genetic parts.
DANIEL: It feels it. Let’s finish this part up with Oxford Languages, who came out with theirs not too long ago, and the word was RIZZ.
BEN: Oho! They went really young.
DANIEL: Yeah, they did, actually.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I like that… I just have this picture of a bunch of really doddery, older Oxford type, which I know they’re probably not, but that’s like the brand of Oxford, right? is this like, “We are the last word on words.”
DANIEL: It is part of their appeal.
BEN: And kind of gone with, like, RIZZ.
DANIEL: Yup. And remember, this is not the Oxford English Dictionary. This is Oxford Languages, which is sort of like an organisation that does stuff with words, but it’s kind of like a feeder… It feels to me like it’s a feeder for Oxford. So, if it does well with Oxford Languages, then it goes on. But they chose that. I thought it was interesting because RIZZ was actually big on the list for the American Dialect Society back in 2022. So, this is not a new one, but it seems like one that Oxford is just sort of catching up on.
BEN: Alrighty. Are we done with the notables, with the whistle stop tour of dictionaries and dictionary-like entities?
DANIEL: We’re done with that for the English language. But now, we have to talk about languages other than English, many of them suggested by Diego. Hey, Diego, do you want to patch in? You’re welcome to come and tell us about these. I’ll pin you. You want to come in?
DIEGO: Yeah, sure.
DANIEL: Awesome, there we go.
DIEGO: Hey, everybody.
DANIEL: Thank you so much for being such a great contributor over the year and over the years. Diego is always flooding us in our Discord with lots of show ideas, lots of news items. It’s so great to have you. Thank you for all you do. It really does help the show. It means a lot.
DIEGO: Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure.
DANIEL: So, where do you want to start? I’ve got a bunch here. Do you want to start with German?
DIEGO: Which German? Swiss German or German German?
BEN: [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:25:14] Deutsch?
DANIEL: I was thinking of not Swiss German at first. I thought we’d take the four Swiss languages all at once. I’ve got KRISENMODUS.
DIEGO: Right. Crisis mode, I believe.
BEN: Ah.
DANIEL: That’s nice.
DIEGO: Yes. Let me just find it.
DANIEL: There are a lot of reasons to be, well, you know, a little bit concerned about the disruption that happens all around us. And I have young ones who are starting to realise that they’re going to die. I’ve got young daughters who are at that age where they’re starting to recognise, “Oh, I am mortal.” And we do a lot of talking with my five-year-old and my seven-year-old about how change is always around us. But it feels like the pace of change is really, really huge. Things are popping up. Things are existing that just simply didn’t exist. ChatGPT again, but also chaos in the world around us. So, “crisis mode””, it’s fair, right?
BEN: Yeah, I feel like that one doesn’t require a whole lot of explanation. People can be like, “Oh, crisis mode was Germany’s Word of the Year,” and we’d all be like, “Yeah. That tracks.”
DANIEL: Yeah, fair, fair. Let’s see, what else you got? What’s the next one you want to tackle?
DIEGO: Yeah. One that I just found yesterday is actually the Basque Word of the Year, or Euskaltzaindia.
DANIEL: Yeah, hit us.
DIEGO: Yeah. So, the word in Basque, I think I’m saying it correctly, is ZERRENDA, which means strip, as in the Gaza Strip. The full phrase in Basque would be GAZAKO ZERRENDA. And I guess they’ve chosen it as the Word of the Year mainly because of how often the Gaza Strip has come up in the news recently, but apparently also because the word itself, in Basque, zerrenda, has multiple meanings including list, like a list of things or a ribbon or a band similar to a strip. So, it’s kind of twofold, the political usage of the word, but also kind of to remind Basque speakers that the word ZERRENDA also has this meaning in this context of Gaza Strip. So, yeah, it’s a little unusual compared to the other ones that have come up this year.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay, let’s go over to Japan, where we’ve got two. One that’s spoken and then kanji of the year.
DIEGO: Yes. I think somebody else found the kanji of the year, but I had seen in a Spanish article, funny enough.
BEN: That’s right.
DANIEL: Yeah. You linked that to me. And that was a funny experience because I was reading it and I’m like, “I’m reading Spanish. This is weird. What’s going on?”
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: James has also, in chat, pointed us to the kanji of the year, so.
DIEGO: Yeah. There’s a decent Japanese population in Peru and Argentina and other… And Brazil, other south American countries. So, I’m not sure if that’s the connection but… [LAUGHS] So, the word is ARE, I believe, which means “that” or “that over there.”
DANIEL: The publishing house, Jiyukokuminsha, chose this word because there’s a winning baseball team of plucky underdogs, the people who haven’t won the pennant. It’s not a pennant, is it? They won the championship for the first time since the ’80s. They used it as an acronym of English words, interestingly. Aim, respect, empower. Noble words that they…
BEN: But it’s a true acronym in the sense that it makes a word when said out loud, kind of thing.
DANIEL: That’s it, that’s it. So, that’s the Word of the Year in Japan. ARE meaning that.
BEN: And ARE when we say that in English, my understanding, my extremely limited understanding is that it’s one of those words that any given language has that is super versatile, I believe. Like, you can be Japanese and be like, “Are, are, are.” And it can mean a lot of different things given the actual context that’s happening. Like, it might mean… Any Japanese speakers in the chat, please weigh in on this, but my understanding is… like the word HEY can mean so much stuff in English, depending on how you’re using it, kind of thing?
DANIEL: Does Japanese have a two-way split like HERE and THERE, or does it have a three-way split like HERE, THERE, and WAY OVER THERE? Could somebody in chat let me know? I think.
BEN: Yeah.
DIEGO: I speak Japanese to a degree. They have a three-way distinction. Near me, next to you, or neither. KORE, ARE, SORE. KORE is near me, SORE is near you, and ARE is neither.
DANIEL: Cool. Thank you, Natheniel. That’s great. I’m trying to produce at the same time as driving. It’s really weird. And then, the kanji of the year.
NATHENIEL: Yeah, if Diego don’t mind, the kanji of the year is ZEI, is taxes.
DANIEL: Taxes.
BEN: As in to pay taxes to the government.
NATHENIEL: Yeah, the money you have to pay to the government.
DANIEL: Yeah. Why did that seem to be so notable this year as opposed to…?
NATHENIEL: Because they have some tax reform, I think. On Wikipedia, they said they have tax cuts and they have introduced a new invoicing system. So, they have reforms on taxes. So, ZEI, taxes for the kanji of the year.
DANIEL: There you go, awesome. Thank you so much, appreciate that.
NATHENIEL: Okay.
BEN: Thank you, Natheniel. That was very informative.
DANIEL: I think it’s time to go to Switzerland. Rebecca via email also mentioned these, so I wanted to give her a shoutout as well. As we know, Switzerland has four official languages, Italian, German, French, and Romansh. So, let’s see. I can see here that in the article you linked to, Diego, Italian, the word is GPT, which stands for I always forget.
BEN: Oh, yeah, true.
[LAUGHS]
BEN: Generated personal text. Generated…
DANIEL: Okay. Oh, James has got it. Generative pretrained transformers.
BEN: Ah, pretrained transformers. Of course. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Not robots in disguise. So, it generates text, it’s pretrained, so they just run a computer over the patterns and then you’ve sort of got your weights and then you can use those weights. And the transformers refer to the way that you insert text at one level, and it just sort of gets handed up through layers and layers of neurons, and at every stage, it transforms the text.
Aaron says, “Is it not exactly robots in disguise, Daniel?” You know what?
BEN: [LAUGHTER] That’s a good point. That’s a really, really good point, Aaron.
DANIEL: Yeah, I can’t say no on that one. All right, well, German. Somebody take it. Diego, save me.
DIEGO: Yes. So, in the Swiss German Word of the Year was MONSTERBANK.
DANIEL: Which is great.
DIEGO: I guess there was a…
BEN: Some sort of banking crisis?
DIEGO: …Or actually, there was a notable bank merger that happened, I guess, because people were… Or, sorry, after the merger, people were starting to worry about what this giant superbank, what kind of consequences it could have.
BEN: Like a concentration of financial blah, blah, blah.
DANIEL: Not just any bank. It was Credit Suisse. Oh, my gosh. And UBS.
BEN: Who did they merge with? Some slightly smaller not…
DIEGO: UBS.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: UBS and Credit Suisse. So, it made Swiss people worry about the creation of a monsterbank which I think should just be the official name.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Someone in the branding department is like, “Oof. Oh, that’s a tough sell.”
DANIEL: You give it a cute cartoon mascot, you’re done.
BEN: I think that’s not how that works.
DANIEL: It’s not how it works but it could be.
BEN: Mind you, BP did it with a green flower. So, who’s the real fucking idiot? Me. That’s…
DANIEL: Yeah, so you just don’t know when you see it, but it’s awesome. And it’s a good time to remember, as Magistra Annie reminds us, that “chatte j’ai pété” in French means, “Cat, I farted.” Let’s go on to French while we’re talking about French.
BEN: I just have this image of someone alone in their apartment just very seriously being like, [IN A FRENCH ACCENT] “Cat, I farted. This happened.”
DANIEL: “Chatte, j’ai pété. [GESTURES IN GALLIC FASHION] Qu’est-ce qu’on fait?” Take me to French. The word was DÉCOMBRES. This is not a word in my vocabulary.
DIEGO: Yeah, it means “rubble” or “debris”.
BEN: Oh, yeah. I can see [CROSSTALK]
DIEGO: Well, it would seem to mostly highlight the natural disasters that have happened this year, mainly the earthquakes in Syria and Türkiye. So, I guess just the aiming to highlight the climate crisis, global geopolitical issues. And apparently, they’re also using it to refer to the collapse of the Suisse… or what is it? Credit Suisse.
BEN: I would have thought this would have been also tied into the political unrest that has sort of plagued Paris this year as well.
DANIEL: Well, we’re talking about the Swiss French.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DIEGO: Swiss French. I don’t know how much they care about what’s going on over in the world.
BEN: My bad, my bad. I thought were just doing French French.
DIEGO: They’re neutral, they’re neutral.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You know what, guys? I’m seeing, folks. I’m seeing a couple of clear themes emerging from our Word of the Year so far. It’s…
DIEGO: Pessimism.
DANIEL: Pessimism…
BEN: Cynicism.
DANIEL: …And computers, I guess maybe one. Maybe one theme. And then in Romansh, the word was Solar Express, which is a program that they’re doing to promote the installation of solar panels on Alpine peaks, which is a very nice use of an Alpine peak. All right, let’s see. I’m going to throw it open. Oh, Ditte, you were telling us that you were covering the Danish scene. If you want to… If you don’t want to, that’s totally cool. But you want to jump in?
DITTE: Yes.
DANIEL: All right, tell me what you got.
DITTE: Well, the actual word we chose is pretty boring because we chose Chat-GPT, so that’s almost the same as a lot of other stuff.
BEN: Classic.
DITTE: They had some other runners-up that were AI related too, and they ended up choosing that because they said they liked it, was something concrete. I would have thought it made more sense with the more generic, but that was their feeling, but I was kind of looking. I listened to the radio show where they decided, and I was looking at all the nominated words and noticing a few themes. There was the AI, and then there was a little bit about gender equality and gender-related language. One of the words was Barbie just because of the movie, but the other was [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:38:32], which means chairperson, as opposed to chairman or chairwoman…
DANIEL: Wow.
DITTE: …because there has been a lot of discussion and people are paying more attention to that gendered language. And there were some climate-related words, not surprisingly, I suppose. And then, a few very sort of specific words to stuff that happened in Denmark, like people’s property valuations being all wrong and a holiday that got cancelled, so we won’t have that holiday anymore.
Oh, actually RIZZ got an honorable mention because someone had nominated it back when the general public could nominate and they were doing the show in front of a live audience at a high school [BEN LAUGHS] and the guy who runs the radio program that chose the word, he’s like early 60s something, and he was like, “I don’t know this word,” and then asked all the young people if they liked it. And it was just like a huge cheer, so generational divide clearly.
DANIEL: You know, this is the thing about Words of the Year. We’re reaching for a statement of our age and how we’re feeling, and we usually do such a good job on that. But we’re also just having a lot of fun with it. As far as RIZZ goes, I forgot to mention this, as you might know, I do a weekly gig on the Australian ABC radio, Perth. I begged the audience, largely older folks, maybe 50 or 60 plus, I begged them to start using RIZZ in conversations with young people. Please just start using it. It’s like…
BEN: Ahh, Daniel.
DANIEL: “That outfit’s a bit drippy on you, but that one gives you mad rizz.”
BEN: No, Daniel. Oh, Daniel. Oh, you are a monster. You are a bad man, and you need to be stopped.
DANIEL: Are you saying that I’m going to kill RIZZ single handedly?
BEN: You absolutely will, at least you know in a micro sense. Like here in Perth, RIZZ will go the way of Facebook and Instagram because that’s where all of the boomers are hanging out and the youth will be like [MAKES CRINGING SOUNDS]
DANIEL: We’ve talked about boomers. Yeah, I mean, I noticed how Ben: is cringing, and he’s not even young, he is only youth adjacent.
BEN: At best, youth adjacent.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, well, hey, thank you for those. I’m going to move it along and unpin some people. Diego, thanks for heading up this section. I really appreciate you and all the others of us who are contributing to these words. All right, we’re going to get into our words, but before we do, it’s time for… Cara says, “I’m 18, and I could tell you that’s the wrong way to use RIZZ, but we appreciate your effort.” Yes, I want to use RIZZ in slightly the wrong… slightly but obviously wrong ways.
BEN: Oh, yeah. Yes, nice defense Daniel, classic. Oh, no, no, [CROSSTALK] No, I was deliberate… Like, no.
DANIEL: Our friendship has never been this endangered. Okay, it’s time for our favorite game with our favorite people. Lynnika, are you here? We used one from you.
LYNNIKA: Yes, I’m here.
DANIEL: Hey, go ahead. And do you mind if I pin you?
LYNNIKA: Sure. Are you talking about PICKET FENCE?
DANIEL: I am. Tell us what you got. What’d you find? Hit us with the question and tell me what made you think of this.
LYNNIKA: So, the question is, is the PICKET in PICKET FENCE related to the PICKET in PICKET LINE? The reason it came up was because I interacted with a picket line and was thinking, you don’t cross a picket line and you don’t cross a picket fence, and wondering if that’s related in any way.
DANIEL: All right.
BEN: Okay. Related or Not, here we go, here we go, here we go.
DANIEL: I’m going to say, I’m going to put up a poll pretty soon, so maybe we’ll sway in, maybe not. I think that yes. And I think that the unifying sense is that you pull up sticks from the fence and you use them to make signs.
BEN: I was going to say the same thing. Literally, exactly what my thought was, which was, you’ve got that classic thing of like a person with the stake over their shoulder with a big placard roughly nailed to it, being like “save our jobs” or whatever it is, something usually very good and like “give us enough money to live and to feed our families” or other whatever unreasonable requests on the part of workers. So, yeah, that’s what I would have thought as well. But maybe I should just be a contrarian and be like, “No, it’s different.”
DANIEL: I think you should listen to your heart.
BEN: Okay, then, yes, I think it is the same.
DANIEL: Okay, Lynnika, I presume that you know the answer, but before you tell us the answer, did you have an intuition going in?
LYNNIKA: I do not know the answer. I was hoping you would do the research for me.
[LAUGHTER]
I often have these questions, and I’m like, “I know how to find that out.”
DANIEL: Well, why don’t we get the audience to do their thing? You can say Related (No, yeah!) or you can say it’s Unrelated (Yeah, nah!) We’ve got a lot of people saying that this is related.
BEN: I’m liking Aaron’s comment in the chat, which is, “I’m rooting for them to not be related, because then I want to know how on earth they ended up converging.” And I actually agree with that 100%. Now, I want them not to be related. I’m like, how could they possibly have come together?
DANIEL: Well, let’s show those results, there we go. So, it looks like a whole ton of people said, “Yup, totally related.” Only a couple of people said, “I’m going to get this, if everyone else is wrong.” And the correct answer is, they are totally related.
BEN: Argh. For the reason we thought?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Okay, this is fun.
DANIEL: PICKET is related to PIKE, and you know that a PIKE is a big old stick.
BEN: Well, a fancy spear, really. A spear with airs, I think, we could call a pike.
DANIEL: Right. Or you could use it to not just defend yourself, but you could stick it into the ground to make a fence, and that’s why you have a picket fence.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And I thought, mm, PIKE, PICKET. Is this another example of diminutive -ET, like PUPPET or like a CASKET is a small cask or a PACKET is a small pack?
BEN: A STRUMPET is a small STRUMP? No? [LAUGHS]
[LONG PAUSE]
DANIEL: And then in 1761, [BEN LAUGHS] it meant a bunch of soldiers acting as a fence. They would look out for the enemy, make it hard to cross. And then by 1867, it meant a bunch of workers, like soldiers, stations outside a factory.
BEN: There you go. So, yes, that is actually… I hope, Aaron, you found that as satisfying as I did, because you’re like, “How did that…?” It’s fun.
DANIEL: Yeah. And by the way, what do you do when your nose goes on strike? Pick it. [BEN GROANS] Thank you. Thank you. Lynnika, thank you so much for that one.
BEN: You’re a bad man. This is the second time in this episode that I’ve just had in no uncertain terms, the absolute certainty that you are a bad person.
DANIEL: I know, but you keep dealing with me. I’m a bad person you can’t stop loving.
BEN: Yeah, you’re my heroin. You’re my black tar heroin, Daniel. That’s what’s going on here.
DANIEL: Enough about that. Let’s go on to Cara. Cara, are you in the audience? Because I picked one from you, which I liked. Cara’s not here.
CARA: Yeah, it’s like 6. So, I’m still in bed actually on my computer. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s fine. You keep your video off. We love hearing your voice.
BEN: What a horrendous way to start your day. I’m so sorry.
DANIEL: Are you on the worst coast?
CARA: I am on the worst coast.
DANIEL: It’s lovely to have you here. Thank you.
CARA: Thank you.
DANIEL: All right, do you remember what it was?
CARA: Hopefully I’m moving to a better time zone. Oh, I submitted like a bunch of different ones. I don’t know which one you guys chose.
DANIEL: I chose CYAN.
CARA: Oh, CYAN and CYANIDE!
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Oh, that’s interesting. Okay.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. First thought.
BEN: My initial gut reaction is yes. Just because it’s such a bizarre collection of letters in English. C-Y-A-N. It’s not a thing that will just randomly jumble together very often. So, based on that. But is there something to do with Welsh in here? Because if I know one thing about Welsh, it’s that it does fucking whack stuff with letters.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Welsh folks, I hope you’re okay with that. You know it’s true.
BEN: I say that with love. I say that, like, good on you Welsh for just taking the lettering system and just going town and just having a great old time.
DANIEL: I don’t know enough myself to say that they’re chemically different. I know nothing about their chemistry. I’m going to say that they are related. And I think maybe it has something to do with the color that cyanide is somehow blue or something. Cara, do you know the answer?
CARA: Mm, I might have at one point. I think I’ve forgotten. I do remember… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I forget these too.
CARA: I looked it up.
DANIEL: That means you get to guess anew. You get to guess all fresh. What do you think?
CARA: Because I… We were talking about cyanide poisoning in my AP bio class.
BEN: As you do. As you do.
CARA: Something to do with like electron chain transport or whatever.
DANIEL: Wow. I tell you what. Shall I launch this one and we’ll have people give it a try? Here we go.
BEN: Ooh, yeah. This is fun.
CARA: Ooh, yeah. I get to guess in here.
BEN: We have a clear leader again.
DANIEL: We must be very convinced.
BEN: A lot of yeses. Yeah, but I like us being wrong. I love us being wrong.
DANIEL: It’s not so lopsided this time. All right, 25 of us have guessed. I’m going to close it off and share the results. Oh, hey, sorry about that last person, I almost cut you off there. Okay, it looks like most of us think that this one is related too. And the correct answer, yep, totally related. Cyan comes from Greek, kyanos. There’s that ka to sa thing, like cycle and kiklos. Anyway, kyanos, dark blue or dark blue enamel and cyanide is from the same thing. Because what happens is you take Prussian blue, which is a kind of blue pigment, chemical name, potassium ferric hexacyanoferrate, has cyan in it.
BEN: Wow. They had so many to choose from.
DANIEL: Uh-huh. And then, you heat it up and you get prussic acid. Who pointed out, was it… Oh, I forget who pointed out that. It was blausäure. Somebody who speaks German, help me out.
DITTE: Well, if you were looking for whoever pointed it out on the Discord, that was me and in Danish, not German, but we have the same. We call it blausäure, but it is in German too.
DANIEL: Thank you. Yes. Okay, so that’s the name there. So, you heat it up, you get prussic acid, and it comes from that blue dye. So, they are totally related.
BEN: Can we just stop for a second though and acknowledge that cyan as we use it does not look particularly blue?
DANIEL: It’s not Prussian blue. Not at all.
BEN: Not at all. Like, cyan is the lightest of blues with a bunch of green looking like it’s mixed in as well. Like the printing color like cyan-magenta-yellow kind of thing. It’s like a really not at all dark blue like at all.
DANIEL: No, it’s cyan.
BEN: Yes, you say that, but you literally just went, “Ah, cyan, the deep Prussian blue”. So, forgive me for being a bit confused, Daniel.
DANIEL: All right, All right, I’ll give you this one.
Let’s do our last one. So, in Discord, I mentioned that I’m reading a book with my kids about Lapland, and I thought, LAP, what’s up with that? And then I learned, to my dismay, that LAP, it is not a nice term. No, it’s an insulting exonym. And instead, we like… Oh, no, I was going to write down what the correct term is the endonym.
BEN: Is it not sammi?
DANIEL: Sabmi, sapmi. I’ve seen sammi and sapmi. So, that was a disappointing thing. I’m going to change my mental lexicon that way. But I thought, hmm, LAP. Somebody can sit on your LAP. A cat can LAP up milk when it drinks. And once around the track or once around the pool is a LAP. Any of these related? We got a three-way split here. I chose the hardest one for last.
BEN: Okay, are we going all three?
DANIEL: Let me put up the poll and here will be your choices. So, the way I’ve decided to do this is they’re all related or none of them are related. But then, we’ve got sitting on your lap, drinking up, lapping up liquid, or running around the track. So, they’re sitting, drinking and running. Do you think that sitting and drinking, those two meanings of LAP are related? Or, sitting and the running a lap, are they related? Or, the drinking and running are related? So, I’ve done a pairwise thing there, if you can get your mind around that. Or they’re all related, or they’re not related. My guess is I think that they are none of them related. I think that it’s so short a word and such common sounds, they could have converged.
BEN: Okay, just to be a bit different, I’m going to guess that there’s some relation going on there. In fact, I’m going to go with only two people and I’m going to say they’re all related. I’m going to go the unsafe route.
DANIEL: Okay, well, I’m going to cut off the poll here pretty soon, 27 of us. This is hotly contested. Here we go. I’m going to share these results. There we go. Screenshot for the video. All right, most people said either only the drinking sense of LAP and the running sense of LAP are related. Or what I chose, which was none of them are related. What did you think, Ben?
BEN: I said all of them are related because I live on the edge, Daniel.
DANIEL: Okay, the correct answer. Here we go, two of them are related.
BEN: Ooh, okay, wait, hang on though. Now, we get to have the fun thing of being like, “Ooh, which two?” All right, two of them are related. So, ten people in the chat thought drinking and running were the two related ones. Like, doing a lap of a track or a pool. [CROSSTALK] I think sitting and drinking are going to be the related two.
DANIEL: Ah, minority view. Okay.
BEN: Hmm-mm. I’m rolling big again.
DANIEL: If you said that the sitting and the running are related, then you are correct.
BEN: Oh, that was another minority opinion.
DANIEL: Kind of, yeah.
BEN: Sitting and running, how is that? The thing that is where crumbs fall and going around a motorised raceway are related? Please tell me how, Daniel.
DANIEL: Well, it’s funny that you should know crumbs falling, because the really old meaning of LAP was, a lap was a flap of clothing or fabric that hung down off of your shirt, and you would use it to maybe catch crumbs or more like flowers. We usually see: “they carried flowers in their lap” which meant a thing.
BEN: So, a bit more of a big pocket that housewives would wear that you could put your berries and your eggs and stuff in.
DANIEL: Yeah, you could put stuff in there.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And then, the meaning pretty quickly jumped to the place on your lap where you kept that flappy bit of your shirt.
BEN: Okay, so essentially it was like a marsupial pouch that we then just used for our lap.
DANIEL: Exactly.
BEN: Okay. Now, take me to raceways.
DANIEL: Okay. When you fold a cloth over like that in your lap, it forms a kind of loop, like the loop on a track. It comes back to the beginning. And they both come from Old English lapa. The unrelated sense — to lap up liquid — comes from a different old English word, lapien, to lap up or drink and this could actually be imitative, echoic.
BEN: An onomatopoeia.
DANIEL: Precisely. So, there we go. So, that was a fun sort of Related or Not. I hope you enjoy these. And we do appreciate the way that people are bringing these. We will endeavor to keep doing as many of these as you’ve got time to give us.
BEN: A little on lapping things up and the imitative sound, my household has a new cat. We had an old cat, and we still have the old cat. I don’t want this to be like a sad story. And then, we got a kitten. We’ve got a new cat. And I did not realise that my first cat drank very quietly because my new cat doesn’t. It just make so much noise.
DANIEL: Did you say, “What the hell is that sound?”
BEN: Yeah. I literally just woke up in the middle of the night and I was like, “Is a ghost choking in my home? What is happening?” A very small creature, but it makes a surprising amount of noise drinking liquid. Anyway.
DANIEL: Ben, we’ve got a request from PharaohKatt to meet the new cat. Do you think it’s possible?
BEN: I held it before, but what I will do, because she’s a little bit of a fraidy cat, is I’ll upload some very heartwarming pictures.
DANIEL: Okay, that would be nice. We have a lot of requests to meet the cat.
BEN: Okay. I’ll bring her maybe at the end if I can find her.
DANIEL: But now, it’s time for the Because Language Words of the Week of the Year. We did 52 of them, and that’s not one per week. Sometimes, we have three or four or none.
BEN: Just so magically happens to make it seem like we do a show a week.
DANIEL: Amazing. And I gathered them up, threw them onto Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Discord. And people could vote on them for comments, as many of you did. Thank you for participating. It was a lot of fun.
Before we get to the top ten, I thought it would be fun to look at weird little things, the words that were weirdly specific to one platform, because sometimes one platform for a certain word, like 50% of that word’s votes would come from just Twitter or just Mastodon.
BEN: Right. So, there was just like a big thing there.
DANIEL: And I wondered if it said anything about the folks who use it. So, Facebook loved HARD LAUNCH, and that is when a famous person busts out a new significant other with no sort of warning. Facebook liked that one. Also, ENGAGEMENT FARMING, which is when you just keep cranking out posts that maybe don’t have much value, but it keeps people engaged. Twitter, five out of the ten votes for WHOM OF WHICH came, an unusual formation, like: “Our striker, whom of which is one of our best players…” blah, blah, blah.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay, fair enough.
DANIEL: Bluesky was interesting. Bluesky liked -TOBER, which is getting inspiration for things during the month of October. Bluesky liked MUMMY. We’re pivoting away from MUMMY and referring to MUMMIFIED people as a way of showing that they are people just like us. I had this experience. There was an Egyptian exhibit at the Boola Bardip in Perth the museum. And I took both of my girls to it, and they said, “What are all these things?” I said, “Well, all these drawings and all these things that they made were ways that they showed the people that they loved them and missed them, and they wanted them to be happy in the afterlife and [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:59:59]
BEN: Man, you guys circle death a lot in your family.
DANIEL: It is not my choice. I just want to talk about Bluey and find Long Dog in every episode, okay. I don’t go there of my own choice. And then, Bluesky also liked SKEET, which is a sky tweet, a post that you make on Bluesky. Mastodon really liked NOCTALGIA, which is sky grief or the sadness that we’re getting so much light pollution and it’s hard to do terrestrial-based astronomy.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And Discord. Hi, everybody. Discord loved SPICY and GIRL. Spicy girl? Hmm, okay. So, let’s talk about the top ten. Are you ready?
BEN: Yes. I’m primed. I’m pumped.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I’m tantalised.
DANIEL: You’re coming up with a lot of ways to say enthused. Maybe you should use that as like a Connections category.
BEN: Oh, that’s fine. I’ve been doing that a little bit recently. Ayesha is so much smarter than I am. It is yet another game where I realise my partner is much cleverer than I am.
DANIEL: Or just patched into American culture.
BEN: Hmm, possibly. I will always have Framed though. At least I can say that.
DANIEL: Yeah, you will. There was a three-way tie for tenth place. Number ten, ANGERTAINMENT.
BEN: ANGERTAINMENT.
DANIEL: These are news stories intended to get engagement by fomenting a sense of outrage in the audience. And it’s an example of the combining form, -TAINMENT.
BEN: Fun. Certainly not new, but the word is new. So, that’s good.
DANIEL: It’s popping up a lot because people are becoming aware of the attention economy and how if you can be horrible, then you can get eyeballs. And that’s just as good as saying something good or something.
BEN: The famous line from the… who’s the famous shock jock in America? Howard Stern? People who love him, listen for 40 minutes. People who hate him listen for an hour and a half kind of thing.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] That’s a good point. I used it with an ABC producer who wanted me to come on because I’m always fielding calls from all over the country, and they say, “Hey, this thing happened. Do you want to do a 50-minute thing at 3:30?” I’m like, yeah, sure.
BEN: They have your number.
DANIEL: They do have my number.
BEN: You are the word guy.
DANIEL: And they use it.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, here was the message. “Hey, would you be open to a chat about Millennial words people hate this arvo?”
BEN: Right. Millennial words that people hate. I had thought that we had moved completely past. I thought Millennials were understood to be Boomer adjacent now. Like, were the sad old crotchety people as well.
DANIEL: Apparently, some people just didn’t get the memo. So, my first response was tart. And then, I erased it.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I thought you were just calling them tarts.
DANIEL: No. [LAUGHS] “Tart.” I frequently do reply that way, but not this time.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And I said, “Could I interest you in a better idea for a show? The reason is that this topic is not the kind of show that’s in the public interest. All it does is lead to a peeve fest. Angertainment feels good, but it’s not good for us.”
BEN: Look at you slowly making the ABC be a bit better. Well done, Daniel. You’re the Toby Ziegler of the Australian radio production zone.
DANIEL: I wasn’t done. I said, “It’s also problematic because the words singled out for hatred are often the ones used by disesteemed or marginalised communities. I’d really encourage you not to do this kind of show, but I can help you find a better topic.” So, that was me.
BEN: Bravo, sir. And let me guess to which they were like, “Can you just shut up and do the thing we want?”
DANIEL: They said, “Yeah, what do you got?” And I gave them a few ideas and they said, “Oh, we’ve got somebody else,” which happens all the time [BEN LAUGHS] and they haven’t called back. Oh, well. They will. They will, because who else?
BEN: They’ll get desperate enough.
DANIEL: That’s right.
BEN: The other word people won’t be available.
DANIEL: But I’ve been thinking about this essay by C. Thi Nguyen called Hostile Epistemology. I’ve been really thinking about it a lot. They point out that when someone is like a QAnon person or they have conspiracy theories or bad… like, they are like anti whatever, we think of them as, “Well, these are people who are kind of bad.” And they point out that bad information uses exploits in our brains, psychological exploits that take advantage of our cognitive limitations. And one of those things is that we like stuff that feels good, and angertainment feels good. But just like with the salty or fatty or sugary foods that I love to eat, it feels good to my body but I don’t always ask myself, “Is this the kind of good feeling that is really good for me or is this a kind of feeling good that’s not that great for me?” And angertainment, I think, is like that. It’s fun…
BEN: Psychological junk food. Yeah, 100%.
DANIEL: So, I’m trying. Let’s see. Also at number ten, THE TISM suggested by PharaohKatt. PharaohKatt, if you want to stick your voice out there and tell us about this one, that’s cool. Otherwise, I can read what I got. What do you reckon? Do you want to? PharaohKatt might be away from the computer.
BEN: No, no, she’s there.
UNNAMED SPEAKER: [UNINTELLIGIBLE 01:03:09] Kitty.
BEN: There we go.
PHARAOHKATT: I’m unmuted now.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Yay. There we go. Hey, tell us about what led you to think about this one?
PHARAOHKATT: I’m slowly dying of plague.
DANIEL: Aw, I am sorry. Get better, okay?
PHARAOHKATT: Yup, yup. Sorry, I finally caught covid. It just took four years.
BEN: Oh, no. You’re no more Team Novid. I’m so sorry.
DANIEL: Sorry, pal. That sucks.
PHARAOHKATT: Brendan’s still somehow immune, but whatever.
BEN: I just love Brendan smugly waving from his isolation chamber.
[LAUGHTER]
PHARAOHKATT: We have been isolating from each other, it’s ridiculous.
DANIEL: Yeah. Good on you. Yeah.
PHARAOHKATT: Okay, the tism. This is something that I’ve seen a lot on Tumblr. So, I don’t know if it’s just a Tumblr thing or if it’s spread out to the wider world.
BEN: Definitely spread.
PHARAOHKATT: But a friend of mine actually posted a picture and said, “I’ve made a room just for the tism.” And it was like a sensory room with fidgets and squishy things and weighted blankets and stuff like that.
DANIEL: Finally makes sense.
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah. It’s a fun way of saying autism, saying, “I have the tism.”
DANIEL: Yeah. A touch of the tism.
PHARAOHKATT: I thought it was fun.
DANIEL: And it’s… This would be appropriate within the autism community, if I can use that term. Would that be right? It might be weird if I said it as an allistic person.
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah. It’s pretty much just the autistic community at the moment. I’m not saying it’s not going to spread to wider use, but right now it’s just an us word.
DANIEL: Okay. It’s an us word. I like that. Awesome, thank you. Well, that’s number ten, so thank you for bringing that up to us.
BEN: What’s the third number ten, Daniel?
DANIEL: GONE PAST TENSE. A metaphor for when an entity dies and the verbs on its Wikipedia page must now be tense shifted. You could even say, “Oh, good. Henry Kissinger has just gone past tense.”
BEN: Look, I don’t want to take it away from GONE PAST TENSE, but yeah, that guy was piece of shit. He was a really bad human being.
DANIEL: Wow. Yeah. I’m just only beginning to plumb the extent of it.
BEN: True historical leaderboard piece of shit kind of thing. This person… I’m not entirely sure how sports work, but I believe in English football circles, the Premier League is in fact just the best of the best of lots of different teams across Britain. And I feel like Kissinger made it into the Premier League of shitfuckery on like a historical scale. So, he gets to rub shoulders with Genghis Khan, Hitler, and Stalin and some of these absolute monsters.
DANIEL: So, Wikipedia user, Asticky, has I think tweeted or something. “I’m now forever the girl who changed IS to WAS on Henry Kissinger’s Wikipedia article.” Nice.
BEN: That’s nerdy, but I respect it.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to number nine, NOCTALGIA.
BEN: Oh yeah, we mentioned this just before, didn’t we?
DANIEL: Just a little while ago, Diego suggested this one. Thank you, Diego. Literally, I got it wrong. I said sky grief. It’s actually more like night grief.
BEN: Yes. Nocturn.
DANIEL: Yes. Sadness of the loss of dark skies on the part of earth-based astronomers as the prevalence of light pollution increases.
BEN: Now, I believe when we talked about this last time, not 30 seconds ago, but when we mentioned it in a show a while ago, I recounted to our listeners and to you guys that in parts of Australia, certainly that I’ve been to that are quite remote and some people might not appreciate this who live in Europe or in parts of America with bad light pollution, is on a moonless night when the Milky Way is in the sky, it can be bright enough to cast shadows on the ground. I’ve experienced that myself. So, yes, I can absolutely understand the grief that can come with losing that ability to sort of almost feel like you can reach out and touch the cosmos. It’s really, really, really… It’s one of those things I imagine what a full solar eclipse would be like. I remember just being like, “Ahh, I’m so insignificant.” In a good way, in a cool way.
DANIEL: Mm. Let’s go to number eight. Another one suggested by Diego. This one was ALGOSPEAK. Code words or expressions used to avoid content moderation. So, saying, “I’ve got CORN” — instead of PORN — UNALIVE. That’s a classic one. Can we… Diego, do you want to patch in? Have you noticed any others that are interesting or… Ben?
DIEGO: I don’t know if it’s necessarily the same thing. I’ll put an example in the chat. But I’ve seen things like for celebrity, they’ll dots in between so that if somebody’s searching their name to take content down or whatever that’s not authorised or approved, they’ll put little symbols in between the actual name or word. And I guess people know to search for it. Like, the people who want to look for it can find it that way, but the people who are trying to get stuff down, they miss it. So, that’s the only other example that I have seen.
DANIEL: Which is very similar to VOLDEMORTING. That’s another example of… That’s a subgroup of ALGOSPEAK.
BEN: I remember ACCOUNTANT was a stand-in for stripping, strippers, or erotic dancers. So, if you were scrolling through TikTok, I saw a couple of people in the windows just being like, “Eh?” if you were scrolling through TikTok. I don’t know what this reflects about me, but I would hope that this is not because I’m following a lot of strippers per se, but because people who speak very sex positively about certain types of work were trying to educate and share tips and that sort of thing. And so, to avoid being crunched down into obscurity, you would refer to yourself as an accountant. The, I guess, most boring of all professions is how they settled on that thing, but I feel that’s a bit mean to accountants maybe.
DANIEL: Magistra Annie has pointed out that it’s euphemism for sex work, not just stripping. Also, Ariaflame and Aaron have mentioned SEAMSTRESS in this context, so that’s useful.
BEN: Oh, thank you. Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Okay. Thank you, Diego, for that one again. You don’t mind me just bringing you on?
BEN: Just producing.
DANIEL: Spotlight!
DANIEL: Okay. There’s a three-way tie for fifth. Jill suggested this one, RAINBOW CAPITALISM, which I defined as ostentatious, vacuous, and insincere corporate support for LGTBQ+ causes, sometimes hastily withdrawn in the face of conservative outrage, as happened with Target in the USA. See also RAINBOW WASHING, RAINBOW CAPITALISM.
BEN: I think there was an example of a beer company in the states this happened to as well.
DANIEL: Bud Light.
BEN: Yeah, there we go.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. Although didn’t they stick by it? Did Bud Light cave? Or did they… To my knowledge, people are still complaining about. I don’t know, I don’t know. Okay, enough said on that one. Also at fifth place, suggested by PharaohKatt and Ariaflame, the GLASS CLIFF. Do you remember this one?
BEN: It has to be related to GLASS CEILING.
DANIEL: It is.
BEN: I am imagining.
DANIEL: You weren’t on this one. So, this one’s new to you. That’s okay.
BEN: Okay. Let me see if I can puzzle this one out. So, GLASS CEILING… So, cliffs are bad. So, it’s something bad that women in position are being promoted to and then badness. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.
DANIEL: Hmm-mm, okay. You are correct on the badness. So, here’s my definition. Women are pushed to the glass cliff when they are promoted to positions of corporate responsibility at times when things aren’t going well and the risk of failure is highest.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay. “Here, you hold these incriminating documents for a moment. I’m going to be over here.”
DANIEL: “Why don’t you be CEO for a while? Good luck.”
BEN: “I’ll be in Key West. Bye. “
DANIEL: LordMortis says in chat “the former Optus CEO just got pushed off of her one. And Linda Yaccarino is also on a glass cliff at X.” Good examples.
BEN: Oof, yeah. Man, tough, tough.
DANIEL: Okay. And then, the other fifth place was suggested by Diego, BEIGE FLAG.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yes. I’ve had thoughts on BEIGE FLAG this year because I felt it shift, and I didn’t like how it shifted.
DANIEL: What’s the shift?
BEN: Well, it originally started out as essentially like warning signs for being boring and bad, right? That was the original semantic meaning of a BEIGE FLAG, which is like, “Oh, I went on a date, and this guy was giving off all sorts of beige flags. Like, he had a strong opinion about whether pineapples belonged on pizza.” And it was just like things that people can do that just prove like, “Ookay. You’re okay.” Not terrible…
DANIEL: Having your favorite font.
BEN: Yeah, exactly, not awful. Those would be red flags. But beige flags would be like, “Okay, all right. Mmm. Hmm-mm? Hm-hmm.”
DANIEL: “You’re a bit cheugy, aren’t ya?”
BEN: Ahh, Daniel. Let it go. Let it go, Daniel.
DANIEL: What’s the new meaning?
BEN: It shifted to be like pet peeves that predominantly girlfriends say about guys, I think. That’s what I was picking up it’s like, “My boyfriend’s beige flag is that he waits too long to put on the windscreen wipers when we’re driving, and it starts to rain,” and weird sort of shit like that but it was said lovingly. Like, it was like, “Oh, isn’t it cute how…?” But I was like, no, no, beige flags are important. We need to know when people are boring and uninteresting, and you need to get out of the conversation. Don’t take the beige flags away.
DANIEL: I don’t think you can take away the beige flags. I think that stuff is pretty obvious. You feel bored, that’s it.
BEN: Yeah, I suppose.
DANIEL: Okay. So, yes, originally a personality attribute or interest so boring that it might make a potential partner unsuitable. More recently, an endearing quirk about one’s partner. Might have to give up on that. Might have to lose that fight, Ben.
BEN: It’s that and DOLLARYDOOS, I will never let go.
DANIEL: I felt the same way as you, Ben. I wanted the Australian currency to be DOLLARYDOOS because of The Simpsons episode. And I wanted to hear finance people say, “The dollarydoo is down against the greenback.” But now…
BEN: They say greenback, right? That shit is weird.
DANIEL: I know.
BEN: Anyway.
DANIEL: I know. But now, I want something different. I’ve moved on. I want something different now.
BEN: What do you want now?
DANIEL: I want DOLLARBUCKS.
BEN: Nah. Hunh-hun. You Bluey dilettante. You johnny-come-lately.
DANIEL: I am no dilettante, sir. I can show you Long Dog in any episode you name. Do you know what I mean by Long Dog?
BEN: Well, sausage dog or dachshund.
DANIEL: Yeah, Long Dog. Who knows? Who knows in chat, what’s Long Dog in Bluey? I’ll wait.
BEN: Let’s wait for the… We will stop everything.
DANIEL: Termy’s got it. Hidden dog. There’s in many episodes, not certain ones like Takeaway. They played Takeaway today on the ABC. It wasn’t in that one. But there’s a small toy that’s hidden in the background in just about every episode. Termy, I see that you are a person of culture as well. You found Long Dogs in many episodes. Aaron says, “Ben’s cleaving to dollarydoos is one of his beige flags.” Touché.
BEN: I love that burn. That is such a good burn. I am a huge fan of Aaron today. So far, he has had multiple cats on his screen, so already a huge plus. And then, making fun of me. But then previously saying things that I agree with. Aaron, you’re the best. Aaah, it’s another cat.
DANIEL: MVP for this episode.
BEN: For sure.
DANIEL: Okay, number three. We’re getting to the top three, although there is a tie for third. PharaohKatt suggested this one. RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY. A humorous or euphemistic term for a rocket explosion.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Now, this predates SpaceX, and we’ve got to also point out that even when the rockets explode, the unmanned test ones, we learn lots of stuff from those explosions. So, even though it seems bad, it’s actually not that bad.
BEN: Yeah. You can’t get to space without blowing a bunch of shit up.
DANIEL: Without breaking some space eggs. So, as we mentioned in the episode, it was first used to describe a rifle that was self-destructing, not a rocket. It went through RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY. Aerospace is just full of humorous euphemisms.
BEN: You’ve got to keep the magic alive somehow, I imagine, because it would be super disappointing if you were a rocket scientist and your rocket exploded, I imagine.
DANIEL: Yup, yup. The other third place was GIRL, suggested by Rach and Diego. So.
BEN: Oh, yes. It took me a second. I was like, “What?” And then, I remembered.
DANIEL: Yep. So, GIRL DINNER, a low-effort meal. GIRL MATH, logic that justifies impulse spending. LAZY GIRL JOB, an easy job. And HOT GIRL SUMMER. What do you think?
BEN: I like it. I like all of those things. I think they’re really fun and playful, and I haven’t seen any of them used or been appropriated in a mean way, which I’m really happy about. No one’s come in throwing massive angst towards girl dinners or girl maths or anything. It’s always been a very fun and irreverent and sort of playful usage that I’ve still observed, which I’m stoked about.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Cara has pointed out in chat that BOY GUESSING is the male counterpart to GIRL MATH. Although I have to say now, who was it? Hang on, let me just get down to my… Doo-doo-doo. Lynnika, you found MATH. Do you want to tell us? Is it okay if you tell us about MATH a little bit? Is that correct?
LYNNIKA: Yeah. I’ve been seeing MATH in all sorts of circumstances that aren’t even number related. Like, BOY MATH, it’s about thinking that you could land a plane or, like…
BEN: Or fight a grizzly bear or some shit.
LYNNIKA: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, this month, it was, “I think I could land a passenger plane.” In 2019, it was, “I think I could probably take a point off Serena Williams in a tennis match.”
BEN: Oh, gosh.
DANIEL: All these men were like, “I think I could probably do that.” No, you could not do that, that is unjustified confidence. That’s BOY MATH.
BEN: I remember… I’m old enough, and here’s how we can tell that Millennials are old, that I remember when I was a kid being taken into the cockpit of planes. Do other people remember when this shit happened? because it is wild to think about now. But it was like you would just be sitting in your little seat as like a five- or six-year-old and the person would come along and be like, “Would you like to see where the captains pilot the plane?” And I would be like, “Oh, my god. Yes, I would.” And they would take you in, and it’s just wall to wall buttons and switches. It’s like the roof switches, the wall switches. There’s even switches on the floor and in front of them. And the fact that a man, of any man, could be like, “I could do that.” It is like 15,000 switches in there, how could you…? Anyway, anyway.
DANIEL: I love seeing GIRL expand its reach, but I also like seeing MATH extend its reach as a kind of internal logic. There could be KID MATH, and I’ve got a lot of examples of those. All right, anything else on that one, Lynnika? We good?
LYNNIKA: Yeah, we’re good. There’s so many examples, but no way to go through all of them.
DANIEL: That’s okay. We got to keep it moving. Let’s see. Okay, now heading back up in my notes. Doo-doo-doo. All right, so yeah, GIRL, a youthful, lighthearted antidote to grind culture, sometimes in protection of one’s own boundaries. Girl, love it.
Helen suggested our number two, and that was SPICY. Not by any means a new one, but Helen suggested that this was something… Whereas we always have had spicy takes, which are maybe controversial takes or covid would be SPICY COUGH or something like that, or you could be NEUROSPICY, now we’re seeing it moving over to in the more sexy side of things.
BEN: Thanks a lot, you fey smut-reading folks, which I put my hand up as someone who has gotten down on those books, and I think that’s… Is that where… Does anyone… Can anyone rule on this? Was that where it first started morphing into its more sexual, sort of semantic kind of space, is in romance books?
DANIEL: I just feel like SPICY started out sexy, went away, and now it’s coming back. That’s how I feel. Dustin in chat says, “I use SPICY with my students when they are being a bit sassy.” Sassy.
BEN: Good, yep, I like that.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. All right, now we’re up to number one.
BEN: Okay, here it is.
DANIEL: This one was suggested to us by LordMortis. And the word is ENSHITTIFICATION. It’s the Because Language Word of the Week of the Year. LordMortis, do you want to come on and tell us how you found this thing and what’s going on for you with this?
LORDMORTIS: Yeah, so Cory Doctorow, our blogging, cape-wearing lord and savior…
BEN: Man of the people.
LORDMORTIS: Exactly. He’s a bit of a lefty, and he wrote this huge thing about how venture capital builds services in a way that basically causes them to become bad for the people that use them and bad for everyone, ultimately. And the term he coined for this, I believe he coined it, was ENSHITTIFICATION. So, first, Facebook is like, “Here’s a free service where you can talk with all your friends, and we will make sure that you only see what your friends show.” And then, they’re like, “Hey, stores, you don’t need to maintain a website. You can come onto Facebook and just have your stuff there. And other users, you can just friend with the stores that you want to see. It’s all good.” Then, Facebook is like, “Hmm. We need to juice the revenue number. So, we’re going to allow stores to just advertise in people’s feed by taking some money.” And then, that just keeps rolling on and on until gradually, first the users get screwed because they get this stuff pushed into their feed that they didn’t want to see. And then, Facebook, when it realises that no one has websites anymore, just cranks the cost on the advertising, thus screwing all the stores who no longer have anything and who wins? Facebook wins and their shareholders win. And ENSHITTIFICATION, everybody else loses.
DANIEL: Yep. That’s a great summary. That is exactly right. People are using it a couple ways. Sometimes, it’s called platform decay, but sometimes we just use ENSHITTIFICATION to describe a lot of things that are just kind of getting worse.
BEN: I want to rep Hedders here, who, RIP, is slowly dying in her bed somewhere. She said if this wins, she would have talked about the fact that email clients and Chrome, the web browser, are both strong candidates for enshittification. And I’ve got to be honest, I agree.
DANIEL: So, this term was coined by Cory Doctorow. I had the chance to talk to Cory Doctorow…
BEN: Get the fuck out of here, really?
DANIEL: …when I found out that this was going to be one of the words. Let’s hear a bit of this.
BEN: How are you going to do this? Are you going to hold up a phone?
DANIEL: No, I’m sharing the video.
BEN: Oh, nice one!
[VIDEO BEGINS]
DANIEL: We are here with author, journalist, activist, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, internet legend, and now wordsmith, Cory Doctorow. Hi, Cory. Thanks for hanging with me today.
CORY: My pleasure. Thank you very much.
DANIEL: Looks like your word, the word that you created, ENSHITTIFICATION, is the Because Language Word of the Week of the year. Congratulations.
CORY: Well, I’m excited by this, especially given my fellow Canadian, Gretchen McCulloch’s contribution to BECAUSE. I don’t know what part of speech it is. Is it a preposition?
DANIEL: I think preposition will be good.
CORY: Yeah.
DANIEL: Is it? No, conjunction. I’m getting my grammar wrong. [LAUGHS]
CORY: That’s it. I have written dozens of books, but I am not a grammarian.
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s one of those things you kind of do on the side, but you don’t tell anybody about, right? Yeah. So, tell me about enshittification. Have you noticed that this word has gotten traction, especially this year?
CORY: Yeah, sure. I make up silly words all the time. I’m a blogger. I’ve been a blogger for coming up to a quarter of a century now. And every day, I write about the stuff that seems important. It’s actually a really critical way to how I write novels and nonfiction books as well. I just have this giant database of everything that seemed important and why I thought it was important at the time, and that turns out to be a very useful resource to have when you’re writing. I wrote nine books during lockdown, so that’s how I did that much, was by having that giant database just sitting there for me.
So, sometimes those words hit, and ENSHITTIFICATION was one of them. It describes a process of platform decay, where internet platforms are first good to their users. They tempt those users in, they find a way to lock them to the platform. Perhaps, that’s with digital rights management, or by using predatory pricing to drive all the competitors out of the market. Think of Uber getting rid of all the regular taxis and convincing cities to stop spending on public transit by losing 41 cents on every dollar they earned for 13 years until they’d lit $31 billion worth of Saudi royal money on fire, and then doing a little rug pull and saying, “Now, taxi drive rides cost twice as much and we’re paying the drivers half as much. We’re in profit, and you don’t have any buses or taxis you can take because we did this long con.”
So, you have platforms that are good to people, they bring people in, they lock people in, and then they take back some of the surplus they gave to their end users, and they give it to their business customers. So, think of, say, Facebook, which started off by promising users that they wouldn’t spy on them and that they would only show them the things that they ask to see, the stuff that they’d explicitly asked to follow. And then at a certain point, just went to the advertisers and the publishers and said, “Hey, do you remember when you told these rubes we weren’t going to spy on them and we’d only show them the things they asked for? We’re going to spy on them with every hour that God sends and cram your media nonconsensually into their eyeballs. We’ll give you a free traffic funnel for your website. We’ll give you cheap ads.”
And then, once those publishers and advertisers, those business customers, are locked in, they withdraw the surplus from them. Advertising gets more expensive. It gets less well policed. At a certain point, Procter & Gamble zeroes out its 100-million-dollar-a-year programmatic ad spend and sees no drop in sales because most of those ads weren’t being shown to anyone. And obviously, publishers find that Facebook just doesn’t recommend their stuff anymore unless they pay to boost it. And yet, they’ve been made into these commodity backend suppliers for Facebook.
And so, then the platform has taken the surplus away from end users and business customers, and it gives it all to its shareholders. And it tries to maintain this brittle equilibrium where things are very bad for all of us, but not so bad that we leave. And that equilibrium often shatters, because the difference between, “This place sucks, but I can’t bear to leave,” and, “Oh, my god, why am I here? I’m leaving now,” is like one live stream mass shooting or privacy scandal or whistleblower.
And then, you’ve got the final stage, which is when the whole thing turns into a pile of shit, which involves doing something that you and I would call panicking, but which tech bros call pivoting. And the pivot in Facebook’s case is like, “Sure, we’ve spent like a decade and a half telling you that your future is this text-based message board with your racist uncles, but actually, we were wrong. The real future is that we’re going to convert you to a legless, sexless, low-polygon, highly surveilled cartoon character in a virtual world called the Metaverse we stole from a 25-year-old science fiction novel. Off you go.” And so, that really rings a bell.
I think lots of things are getting worse for lots of reasons. We are I think, in a late stage of capitalism. The end of the zero-interest rate policy has put a lot of pressure on firms to increase profits or to be profitable for the first time. There are lots of things that haven’t come back since the acute phase of the pandemic and maybe never will. And so, there’s just this enduring sense that a lot of what was good before, even when things weren’t good overall, is gone, and what’s left is slipping away. And so, the word, enshittification, really seems to have captured a sensibility among many people, captured the structure of the feeling of the moment, and lots of people are using it.
And I can tell it’s catching on because I’m being denounced for it being simplistic or failing to… or being redundant to something else or whatever, and also because other people are using it in a very simplistic way. And then, still more people are denouncing those people for being simplistic in how they use it. I know now that definitely this word has caught on.
DANIEL: It certainly has. And I want to talk about those two kinds of senses of enshittification, because when you coined it in 2022, you meant something quite specific. You were talking about platform decay and the way that they gave us a playground to play in, but then we brought our friends, and now they own our friends, and now it’s too painful to go. But now, people do kind of make it mean something a little more general, like a general sense of disaffection with, I don’t know, late-stage capitalism or the way things are. Do you notice that this is gaining traction for more general reasons and not for the reasons that you intended at first?
CORY: Well, I actually… The first time I used ENSHITTIFICATION, I didn’t mean it in this formal sense of platform decay. I was actually on a vacation with my family, and we were staying in a place with very poor internet. We were in a cloud forest in Puerto Rico in a cabin we’d rented, and it was really far into town. And in order to figure out where we were going to eat, we would need to get on the internet, and the internet was very slow. And so, we go to Tripadvisor and look up restaurants. And the internet in this place came via microwave relay, and microwave relay doesn’t work when there’s a cloud between the relays. And we were, I remind you, in a cloud forest which meant that the internet came and went a lot. And I would get a Tripadvisor page loaded with five restaurants in town, and I try to open the pages for each of them, and I go away for half an hour and come back and the only thing that would have loaded was the favicon, the little icon that goes in the tab, which would be rendering in the screen as this giant vector graphic.
And eventually I tweeted, “Has anyone at Tripadvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most enshittified service I’ve seen.” And a lot of people just liked the word. And so, it just became part of my lexicon. I used it to describe things periodically. And I think ENSHITTIFICATION, like that EN- prefix, like encysting, like when something becomes a cyst gets covered over with a cyst, there’s a nice mouthfeel to that prefix. It’s one of those words like OVIPOSITOR, that just sounds like something really unpleasant is going on, or BLOOD FUNNEL or any of those words. And then, ENSHITTIFICATION. So, it’s just a funny way of saying getting shitty.
DANIEL: There’s lots of Latin going on. Latin prefix, Latin suffixes. But then, you’ve got SHIT right in the middle of it and you can’t disguise that.
CORY: Yeah, a nice Anglo-Saxon monosyllable. And it’s fun to say. It’s naughty. I’ve heard from many academics who’ve incorporated it into their work and are quite pleased with themselves for slipping the word SHIT into a peer-reviewed journal with a high-impact factor. I think a lot of people loved, like Harry Frankfurt’s book, On Bullshit, partly because it’s a good essay, but just there’s something cool about a book with the word bullshit on the cover. It’s why we like Penn and Teller TV series.
I get why people are using it colloquially or loosely, and I think that it’s distinct from other phrases whose meanings have drifted that are in a similar vein, like SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, for example, which I think a lot of people who didn’t read Zuboff heard the phrase SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, which is a very good phrase, and said this is a critique of capitalism. And actually, Zuboff is extremely bullish on capitalism and thinks that surveillance makes capitalism stop working. But if we curb the surveillance, the capitalism would be fine. So actually, a reason that she and I disagree, I actually wrote a book about this called How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, about the way that capitalism produces the regulatory capture that produces the platform decay that includes surveillance. And that a lot of the claims that she makes about surveillance that allows her to redeem capitalism like surveillance is allowing tech bros to control our minds, which then short circuits capitalism’s ability to aggregate our decisions, which is how we get efficient markets, I don’t think those claims are true.
I think tech bros claim they have built a mind control ray. I think they’re lying. Lee Wenzel calls this CRITA-HYPE, where you believe someone else’s hype, but then you criticise them as though it were true. I don’t think it’s true. I think everyone who ever claimed to have a mind control ray was like kidding themselves or everyone else, or both, whether that’s Rasputin or MKUltra or pickup artists or Mesmer.
So, I think that Zuboff is often quite distressed based on her public pronouncements. She’s quite distressed about the drift in the meaning of the term SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM and about its use as a critique of capitalism itself. I don’t feel like the colloquial use of enshittification to describe things that are just worse, I don’t think that it dilutes the more technical meaning. It just becomes, if anything, like a kind of metaphorical use of enshittification.
I’m trying to think. I’m sure there’s examples of this where we have a technical term like DUTY CYCLE. I will often say, like, “Oh, I’ve stopped grinding my coffee by hand because my wrist tendons have only got so many duty cycles left in them, and I want to be able to write books forever.” It’s a metaphor, right? I don’t literally mean it in the sense that a mechanical engineer would.
DANIEL: Is enshittification inevitable? Is it just part of the lifecycle of a company? Or is there a way out?
CORY: Yeah, I don’t think it is inevitable. I think collapse is inevitable. I think firms, by and large, have run their course, and lots of people have theorised why you have the innovators dilemma and the old axiom, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. First generation makes it, second generation spends it, the third generation loses it. All of these different ideas. I think that lots of firms came and went without enshittifying. Cray. Cray was giant, they made supercomputers. Silicon Graphics bought them. Silicon Graphics failed, that was the end of it.
Enshittification is this kind of… You could analogise it maybe to this thing that we’ve done with end-of-life care, where people who normally would have died relatively quickly at the end of their life with cancer, and who would have just controlled that last month of their life with heavy analgesics, opioids or whatever, now extend their lives by eight months but spend those eight months in absolute agony and bankrupt their families and do not die with dignity. There’s good work on this in… oh, I’ve forgotten his name, the guy who wrote On Dying. He invented medical checklists, great MD, surgical checklists. Gosh, I’ve blanked his name anyway. That there are much more pleasant ways to die. And doctors themselves generally refuse this kind of care; they don’t want it.
And so, we’ve done this with companies. We prolong their senescence in a way that maximises the harm to their suppliers and users, rather than having a kind of graceful ending. And it’s as though not just that you’re keeping someone alive at their end of their life, even as their cognitive faculties decline and they’re unable to make sound decisions, but you’re leaving them in charge of lots of other people’s lives.
The period in which Mark Zuckerberg was even remotely reliable as someone who made decisions that made other people happy ended 15 years ago. But 4 billion people still have their lives entirely run online by the whims of this grotesque manchild.
So yeah, this is the outflow of a failure to enforce competition law. We stopped doing that little by little in the Carter Era. Things got more aggressive in the Reagan Era. Every administration since until the current one has stepped that up. Today, we are finally at a point where competition law is being more aggressively enforced. It’s the first reversal in two generations, and it’s bipartisan and global. It’s happening in Australia and Canada, the UK, the EU, China, and the US. And it’s so bipartisan that one of the main antitrust bills in the Senate right now, the AMERICA Act, which will break up Meta and Google, its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren.
So, we are definitely at a moment in which people in many places, under many political systems and who hold many different political theories are all coming around to the idea that we need market competition even if you don’t believe in markets as a way of solving problems, even if the only reason you want market competition is to degrade the unity of an industrial sector as they approach their regulators and lawmakers and turn them into a squabbling rabble of hundreds of companies that can’t agree on where to hold a meeting where they would discuss their lobbying priorities, much less what those priorities should be.
DANIEL: Sounds like what we came to with our episode with Dr Emily Bender on AI and large language models. Hey, what if we enforce the laws that we already have? It sounds like that’s what we’re coming to.
CORY: Yeah, I think Emily’s completely right. I think that a lot of the sui generis rules that people cook up for new technologies are often ill conceived. And start from the premise that we don’t already have rules that could manage this. And because they fail to ask how it is we’re not enforcing current laws, like what are the problems that stop us from enforcing current laws? In Europe, for example, they’ve had a very strong privacy law for about eight years now, the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. But they haven’t enforced it, especially against large American firms, because those firms all fly the flag of convenience of Ireland, which is a crime haven that attracts companies that want to cheat on their taxes, and any company that can fly a flag of convenience can move. That’s what it means to be a company that can pretend to be Irish, is that you could pretend to be Maltese next week.
And so, Ireland then has to compete with other would-be crime havens to not enforce other laws that corporations would like to not have enforced. And among those is privacy law. And so, the Irish privacy regulator hears like 17 major cases a year, unlike the German privacy regulator, which hears like 500, even though Ireland is the notional home to every major tech company in Europe.
And so, yeah, if you just make another law and you don’t ask what’s wrong with our federalism that our existing laws aren’t getting enforced, then you’ll just have another law that doesn’t get enforced. And actually, we see with the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, the new tech laws the European Union has just enacted, they have a different enforcement mechanism that streamlines the movement to federal enforcement across the EU and out of these regional courts that are more easy to co-opt, that might provoke a federalist crisis. Anyone who lives in America or Canada or Australia or any other federation knows that the preemption of regional rights by the central government can be problematic. But at the same time, maybe this will work, so they’re learning from it.
I think that Emily is right that there are plenty of rules that we could use to deal with AI. I think that there are also regulatory approaches that instead of looking for the individualised element of each problem that we have and trying to make a narrow rule for each of them, that might be so narrow as to be useless and might be so specific as to be quickly outmoded.
There’s another regulatory approach where you look for the common element among many problems, and you then try to regulate around that common element, first of all, because that gets you a lot of bang for your buck. But second of all, because it builds a coalition of people who care about a lot of different. So, you know, I don’t think much of Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism hypothesis, that big tech built a mind control ray to sell your nephew fidget spinners, and now a billionaire stole it and made your uncle into a QAnon. But I think that what both of us agree on is if we enforce privacy law, if we had a good federal privacy law in the United States, which we don’t, that it would cut off the supply of data that’s being used notionally to target those people.
Moreover, if you’re worried that TikTok is exposing American people to Chinese propaganda, then you’re also worried about the collection of private data. That’s where the supply comes from. And if you’re worried about cops serving reverse warrants on Google and enumerating all the people who are president of Black Lives Matter demonstration, that’s also a privacy thing. And if you’re worried that Instagram is giving girls bulimia because it’s targeting them, well, that’s also a privacy thing.
And so, we could just say privacy first. Let’s all of us who maybe disagree about which parts of these matter or which parts of these are even real, but who all agree that if we had a privacy law, these problems would be substantially fixed. Like, if you’re worried that the ad tech sector is usurping money, that should go to the news sector through surveillance advertising, that accounts for 51% of every advertising dollar being sucked up by the two big companies, Google and Facebook, then let’s just turn off surveillance advertising and replace it with context advertising, where the advertisements are sold based on what you’re looking at, which is a thing publishers know very well, as opposed to who’s looking at it, which is a thing that only tech companies will ever know very well.
And now, we’ve got the news companies on our side too. That I think is a really good approach not just for the kumbaya reason of building a big tent, but also because it’s like sound tactics.
DANIEL: Yeah, brilliant. Hey, this conversation went a lot harder than I thought it was going to. I thought were going to talk about a word that had SHIT in it, and we ended up talking about solving a whole bunch of problems, but I’m really grateful to have your insight. And once again, congratulations on ENSHITTIFICATION, our Word of the Year.
CORY: Thank you very much.
DANIEL: And thanks for coming on and chatting with me.
CORY: Thanks, Daniel.
[VIDEO ENDS]
DANIEL: That was Cory Doctorow. Amazing to chat with him.
BEN: What a get.
DANIEL: I would say that’s a get. So big thanks to Cory for that. And thanks to you, LordMortis, for suggesting that word for us. It was really fun to talk about. And it is the winner of the Because Language Word of the Week of the Year for 2023.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: I would just like to say once again, a big thanks to Cory Doctorow, a big thanks to the team from SpeechDocs for transcribing our words, all the guests from 2023, and here they all are. And if you can remember the episode that they were in and what you’ll learn from it, this was just a wonderful memory for me. We heard from Mark Ellison, Dennis Baron, Pharaohkatt, Nick Enfield, Morten Christiansen, Jack Grieve, Emily Hofstetter, Eleonora Beier, Russel Gray, Aris Clemons, Caitlin Green, Rikker Dockum, Helen Fraser, Georgina Heydon, Diana Eades, Sean Roberts, Steph Rennick, Emily Bender, Jack Hessel, Jenni Nuttall, Rob Drummond, Robbie Love, Diego Diaz, Sarah Ogilvie, Nicole Holiday, and Andrew Perfors.
Thanks to all of the people who contributed and Ben and of course Hedvig. Ben, I’d like to thank you for being here for another great year of shows.
BEN: Eh, I’m garbage. Those people are amazing. They’re great.
DANIEL: And most of all, you, our patrons, who keep the show going.
BEN: Now, they’re not garbage.
DANIEL: They are the finest humans that I could find.
BEN: They are the cream of the crop.
DANIEL: I’ll start the reads, shall I?
BEN: Yeah, go for it.
DANIEL: Our music has begun. If you are a patron, thank you for supporting us. You can support Because Language in other ways, not just patrony. You can give us ideas and feedback like so many of the voters and so many of the suggesters. The people who have given us the ideas for the show, they really keep the show going. You can help us that way, too. You can follow us on the socials. We’re becauselangpod on just about every conceivable social platform. If you go to our website, becauselanguage.com, you can find the little SpeakPipe thing and leave us a voice message or just send us a file by email. That’s fun too. Speaking of email, it’s hello@becauselanguage.com. Another thing you can do to support the show is tell a friend about us or leave us a review. Take it down.
BEN: Now obviously, all of the people who are currently listening to this are patrons. And you guys are wonderful. I’m sitting in a room, digitally speaking, with like 26 of these absolute dead-set legends. But if you’re part of the listen later massive. If you are time traveling from the future to the now that I am speaking and you are not a patron, well, you should consider becoming a patron because it helps us do a bunch of stuff. For instance, all our shows get transcribed, so you can be like, “I’m pretty sure Ben’s used that joke before. Let’s see how tired and archaic Ben’s jokes are.” And then, you can just search for all the times that I’ve said a particular joke. And you can… I think, Daniel, you’ve done this to me. You’ve actually… One of our favorite bits of all of Because Language is when you figured out whether I use a certain word versus another word. What was that one?
DANIEL: It was either /iðɚ/ either /aɪðɚ/ and neither /niðɚ/ neither /naɪðɚ/, which we still haven’t had anybody do any work on. So, I don’t know.
BEN: So, patrons, you help make me look stupid, which I personally think there are very few better uses for money in the world. But you will also allow us to give money to our guests so that we’re not just stealing the intellectual labor of people who work really, really hard, which is really good. And if you become a patron, you’re part of the listen later massive, you can become part of the listen now massive. The Discord server, the live episodes like the one that we’ve just recorded, that’s all coming your way if you get down and become a patron. Even just a little baby patron, and you can get all those cool things.
DANIEL: I’d like to give a shoutout to our top patrons. Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, Gramaryen, Larry, Rene, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Diego — sorry for not reading your name out last time — Diego bumped to supporter and I somehow missed it, but here we are. Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, the Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, Laurie, aengry balls, Tadhg, Luis, Raina, and new patrons at the Friend level Nick, taking out a yearly membership. Big thanks to all our great patrons.
BEN: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Kraplianov, who also performs in Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.
DANIEL: Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next year. Pew, pew, pew.
BEN: Pow, pow, pow. Or sooner, presumably because we’ll have another show that we invite people to.
DANIEL: I don’t mean IN a year.
BEN: Oh, okay, okay. See you in the next calendar year. If people want to hang out, I’m going to go see if I can find a kitten, hold on.
[BOOP]
BEN: I was looking up the word EMBIGGEN for reasons, and I wanted to figure out where it’s sort of contemporary usage can be traced back to. And in the course of doing that, I’ve discovered, and I probably shouldn’t be surprised.
DANIEL: We know this, right?
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Surely, it’s The Simpsons.
BEN: It is The Simpsons and it’s contemporary, yeah, yeah. But I think the more surprising thing, or at least the thing that I’m actually remarking on, is not so much where that word comes from, but the fact that Lisa the Iconoclast, which is the episode that it is credited to, has a like five- or six-scroll-long Wikipedia page, which makes me think that there’s probably one of those for every episode of the Simpsons and that is delightful. I find that really delightful. That’s a season 7 episode as well. So, it’s not like early or anything like that. That’s quite remarkable.
DANIEL: Which one was Lisa the Iconoclast? Because I know the end…
BEN: I think that’s where she finds out the truth about Jebediah Springfield.
DANIEL: I have always disagreed with that episode.
ARIAFLAME: And that’s 1996.
BEN: What do you disagree with, Daniel? Do you think that Jebediah Springfield really was like a man of the people?
DANIEL: God, no. Friggin… Remind me if I’m wrong, because it’s been like 17 years since I’ve watched this. But doesn’t Lisa find out the truth about Jebediah Springfield and then decides to conceal that truth? Because truth is for the smart people and…
BEN: And, yeah, that is true. I can see how the core message there… There’s a bit of a Grease vibe, isn’t it? Like, change for your man.
DANIEL: She decides that the only way to hold people together is with lies. Nuh-hunh.
BEN: Now that you frame it that way, the cynicism in me is like, “Well, isn’t there some truth to that?”
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]