Jennifer Schuessler, a longtime lover of language, always awaits Oxford’s Word of the Year with anticipation.
Every November, while my colleagues on the Culture Desk at The New York Times are preparing their year-end lists of the best movies, theater productions, songs, art and more, I’m waiting for one announcement with curiosity and some anxiety: Oxford University Press’s Word of the Year.
The proclamation, from the people behind the Oxford English Dictionary, is meant to anoint a new or emerging word that sums up “the ethos, mood or preoccupations” of the year. The word of 2023 is “rizz,” which is Gen Z slang for “style, charm or attractiveness,” or “the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner.” (Some say it’s a shortened form of “charisma.”)
Reader, I had to look it up.
We at The Times are expected to have a decent command of the English language. As a reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas, I’ve also ended up writing about it. In my 12 years on the beat, I’ve covered the language of restaurant menus, the earliest recorded instance of the term “African American” and the peculiar dialects of Midwesterners. I’ve explored previous Words of the Year, including “vax” and “goblin mode.” And I’ve profiled lexicographers, the people who research and write dictionaries. (A surprising number of them have purple hair. And rizz.)
I rarely play Wordle and I stink at Spelling Bee. But I’m fascinated by the English language — by its quirks, its lore and what the serious, scholarly study of it reveals. Oxford’s Word of the Year selection may be a whimsical publicity exercise and a fun break from the news cycle, which is especially welcome this year. But it also offers a peephole — one that’s grounded in word-crunching and data-driven analysis — into the way we live and talk right now.
Everyone loves new words. And Oxford tracks their emergence by combing through its corpus of more than 22 billion words, drawn from news sources across the English-speaking world. That corpus helps researchers find both large language patterns (like subtle shifts in usage spurred by the pandemic) and delightfully singular needles in a haystack (such as the earliest known occurrence of the slang term “lumbersexual,” for example). Lexicographers also pay attention to social media, which is both fertile ground for linguistic creativity and a vector for the rapid spread of new words, like rizz.
But language, of course, is not just about the new. It’s a record of our collective past. And the study of language still carries a whiff of slightly nerdy old-fashionedness.
In 2017, I took one of my favorite reporting trips, to the headquarters of Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in the United States, to interview the lexicographer Kory Stamper about her book “Word by Word.”
Located in a stolid red brick building in Springfield, Mass., Merriam-Webster was sort of a ghostly place. There were very few people walking around, but there were lots of out-of-print dictionaries, including a 1934 edition billed as “the thickest book ever printed.” There were rows of filing cabinets of varying vintage; in the basement, I saw a bunch filled with the remnants of an abandoned project known as the Backward Index, which included some 315,000 cards listing words spelled … backward.
I love speaking with language experts. But the story of the English language is being written by all of us who use it. These days, most language scholars are “descriptivists” rather than “prescriptivists.” That is, they understand language as governed by the ways people use it, not by a system of rules decreed by experts.
Which isn’t to say everyone is always equally right about language, even if they think they are. One thing I’ve learned working the word beat is that when it comes to the origins of words, a lot of people are very sure of themselves. Like, very, very, very sure.
In 2012, for example, I wrote about the discovery of instances of the expression “the whole nine yards” in regional newspapers of the 1910s. That was roughly four decades earlier than the term was previously known to have appeared. (Such discoveries are known as antedatings.)
In my article, I noted lexicographers’ exasperation with longstanding (and highly dubious) folk etymologies for the expression, like the claim that it came from the amount of material in a Scottish kilt. Or the length of ammunition belts in World War II aircrafts. Or yardage in football. Or the amount of beer a British naval recruit was obligated to drink. Et cetera, et cetera.
The new discoveries pretty definitively ruled out those theories. But sure enough, the comments section was full of people repeating them anyway.
Cue more eye-rolling from lexicographers. But I try to look for silver linings. Irregardless of their stubbornness, people really care about language.
(To all you language scolds out there: Yes, “irregardless” is a word. If you don’t believe me, just look it up.)
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