Word of the Year

Turn on my VCR

Same one I've had for years

James Brown on the TAMI show

Same tape I've had for years

I sit in my old car

Same one I've had for years

Old battery's running down

It ran for years and years

When the world is running down

You make the best of what's still around

When the world is running down

You make the best of what's still around

-The Police

So, apparently over the decades I've missed this ritual of dictionaries selecting their "word of the year", perhaps as a marketing tactic.

Merriam-Webster went the safe route in 2024, with "polarization". Who wouldn't agree that one sums up the experience of the last several months or years?

But boring. Just boring.

The Oxford University Press conducted a poll with thousands of entries, and ultimately selected "Brain Rot" as its word of the year. The term is defined thusly:

‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.

Definitely a thing, but did no one notice that this is in fact not one word, but two? Maybe they're shooting for irony. Or maybe this is just an outward display of the very thing they're trying to define.

For my money, the clear winner as WOTY is "enshittification", this year's selection of the Australian Macquarie Dictionary. The writer Cory Doctorow concocted the word in 2022, used to describe "a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders."

Who hasn't experienced that one? Every online offering from Facebook to Airbnb has displayed Doctorow's life cycle to some degree, becoming harder to use, less responsive to customer needs and more focused on directing eyes to paid offerings, etc.

But that's too narrow a use of the word; as 2024 ends, the concept of enshittification has jumped its borders from the online world to capture just about everything. Tried buying a car lately? Good grief, the administrative confusion and tangle of forms renders the exercise nothing short of excruciating. Our internet here at the house randomly fails, most recently in the middle of the Bills game yesterday (come to think of it, maybe Spectrum was trying to spare me the pain of that flubbed effort). I begin online finals at NYU on Thursday, and the glitchy software is complemented by a help tab that is, frankly, no help at all. And then, inevitably, as you navigate away from the help tab it cloyingly asks, "Did you find this information helpful?" without giving me an option to respond with, "F*ck no!"

Then there's the touchscreen dash on Peg's Mercedes we just traded for the Cadillac, which would randomly change radio stations for you in some sort of digital seizure. Or the app for the same car that never worked as advertised. Or the online orders I've thought I've made this year, only to find them in the queue weeks later, incomplete for some box I apparently didn't check.

Enshittification is everywhere, friends. It's nice to finally have a word for it.