After going full goblin mode at the weekly staff meeting, you may have imagined your rizz rising, but if you followed up by posting a vape selfie without a vax label your followers might just unfriend you.
If you think this first sentence is complete gobbledygook, making absolutely no sense whatsoever, you are half right. CHAT-GPT4 was given 6 key words and asked to use all of them in a single sentence. Those six words? – goblin mode, rizz, vape, selfie, vax, unfriend. The AI surely knows what the six have in common but didn’t elaborate.
Each year since 2004, the Oxford University Press has selected a Word of the Year – all the aforementioned are past choices. Words and phrases that represent the guiding beliefs or ideals of our culture over the previous year are analyzed by a team of language experts who monitor data and frequency statistics. Public voting helps complete the choice. You may have thought 2022 wasn’t such a bad year, but according to Oxford, we were all in “goblin mode.”
The 2024 Oxford Word of the Year, which is not much better, is “Brain Rot.” It allegedly reflects a growing self-awareness in the younger generation of the harmful effects of digital overload. While the rise of “Brain Rot” in the contemporary lexicon is recent, the term itself is not new.
Prototypical hippie Henry David Thoreau was the first to use it in 1854. As England struggled to cure potato-rot, Thoreau wrote (Walden) “…will not any[one] endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Oxford is not the only language organization to select a Word of the Year. Other offerings for 2024 include “brat” (having a confident, independent and hedonistic attitude), “manifest” (imagining something believing that will make it happen), “enshittification” (gradual deterioration of a service or product due to profit seeking), and, in recognition of the globe’s most widespread election year ever, “kakistocracy” (rule of the worst). You can imagine what CHAT-GPT4 would do with these last four.
The Oxford University Press word process is objective and repeatable to the point where, in 2020 when they couldn’t reach a consensus, they deferred. Thinking back on the events of 2020, this indecision is understandable.
Just as each of these Oxford Words captures the beliefs and aspirations of our culture for a year, so do selections spanning two decades paint a broader picture of our identity and direction. Growing concern with our own wellness, along with that of the world around us, is reflected in choices like Carbon-Neutral, Locavore, Hypermiling, and Climate Emergency. An increasing preoccupation with the impact of Internet Culture reveals itself in Blog (the original 2004 Word of the Year), Podcast, Unfriend, GIF (as a verb), Selfie, and Face with Tears of Joy (referring to the emoji). These trends build to the penultimate Rizz, followed by the 2024 choice Brain-Rot.
Where is this leading us? CHAT-GPT4 predicts that the technology theme will prevail in 2025, with possibilities like “digital detox” or “screen fatigue.” For now, we may have Brain-Rot from our online preoccupation with social media minutiae, but as long we’ve still got Rizz…
Author Profile - Paul W. Smith - leader, educator, technologist, writer - has a lifelong interest in the countless ways that technology changes the course of our journey through life. In addition to being a regular contributor to NetworkDataPedia, he maintains the website Technology for the Journey and occasionally writes for Blogcritics. Paul has over 50 years of experience in research and advanced development for companies ranging from small startups to industry leaders. His other passion is teaching - he is a former Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Paul holds a doctorate in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.