Front Porch: Final words on the year that was - and other years, too

Usually the final Front Porch column I write every year, or sometimes the first one of the new year, is my very favorite one of all – the word of the year column, in which I chew on the words or phrases that lexicographers and others involved in language study have selected to best define the year just ending.

It’s a word nerd’s delight. Often it’s fun. Or it can be serious. But what these words or phrases have almost always been are understandable. But like with a joke … if you have to explain it, the joke is a failure.

And that’s where we stand now. The words of the year for 2025 feel like a misanthropic mess of unintelligible words. Not to bury the lede, I’ll address them in a minute, but I’d rather begin with a nostalgic look at the good old days of word-nerding.

In 1996, the American Dialect Society (made up of some serious word and language scholars) selected “mom” as the emergent word of the year, in reference to the noted rise of voting blocs in society, such as “soccer moms.”

The Collins English Dictionary selected “geek” in 2013 and “binge-watch” in 2015. No explanations required.

Macquarie Dictionary, the dictionary of Australian English, has two words each year, one selected by its professional committee and the other by a peoples choice vote. In 2009, it was “shovel ready” and “tweet,” respectively. Easy peasy.

In 2004, Merriam-Webster chose “blog,” and it was “vaccine” in 2021. The Oxford English Dictionary picked “sudoku” in 2005 and “selfie” in 2013. Cambridge Dictionary had “quarantine” in 2020.

You don’t have to be a linguist, scholar, sociologist, political scientist or undergoing therapy to understand any of these words or their relevance to their designated years. No thesaurus or explanatory paragraph needed.

And where sometimes a little explanation fills out the frame a bit, it was a kind of whimsical or fun – for example, “to be plutoed” (American Dialect Society, 2006), meaning to be demoted, as happened that year to the planet Pluto, which was reclassified to the status of dwarf planet. In 2014 “photobomb,” the prank of inserting oneself unexpectedly into a camera’s field of view while something else was being photographed, was chosen in 2014 by Collins English Dictionary.

But things started turning darker in word-world when COVID rolled around, politics got more insidious and technology became something of a monster. It was then that writing this column got a whole lot less fun.

I now need an operator’s manual for some of the words and phrases chosen as emblematic of a year. Or anti-depressants. Or a geek-to-English interpretation guide.

So now, venturing into words of the year for 2025 …

I may as well start with the most annoying: “six-seven,” as chosen by Dictionary.com’s lexicographers, after researching the year’s word searches and finding that the innocuous word (actually two numbers) has had a sixfold increase in searches, with no sign of stopping.

So what is the darn thing? I had to look up a lot of stuff I really know little about to attempt an answer.

With an origin (probably) in the song “Doot Doot” by Skrilla, it got reinforced by viral TikToks (which need their own explanations) and means (maybe) so-so or is a ubiquitous answer to any question, especially when its signature hand gesture (both palms face up and alternatively moved up and down) is employed.

One observer says it has all the earmarks of brain rot and means – who the heck knows, which is true of a lot of language today, so maybe it’s the perfect pick for our times.

Incidentally, some of the word runners-up for Dictionary.com’s top pick are “agentic,” “aura farming” and “broligarchy.” Got that? Me neither.

Merriam-Webster chose “slop” (no, not pig food) as its word of the year for 2025, which it defines as “digital content of low quality that is produced in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Considered slop, apparently, are stupid videos, weird ad images, absurd “news” items that look real(ish) and herds of talking cat videos. It’s everywhere, so it’s appropriate … but a roadmap is definitely required.

Oxford chose “rage bait,” “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or media content.”

I’m coming off hip replacement surgery; I don’t need any more pain in my life, and rage bait certainly qualifies as that.

“Parasocial” – involving or relating to a connection a person feels to a famous person they don’t know, a character in some form of media or an artificial intelligence – was the 2025 choice of Cambridge, which, in its press release about the selection, noted society’s increasing turn toward AI chatbots for friendships as a factor in the word’s popularity.

Oh, brave new world.

There are others, of course, and a few yet to come this month (such as from the prestigious American Dialect Society), but the new batch of words of the year are getting weirder and weirder, and need so much explanatory support. It’s like they live in a galaxy of their own, with a whole lot of us left behind because we don’t have the right spacesuit or breathing apparatus or, frankly, bandwidth to absorb it all.

I did find one merry item this year from the reject pile, a happy note to end on.

It’s a word that the folks at Merriam-Webster became enchanted with when it started popping up on their top-lookups list. The word wasn’t a glitch in its online code, but rather came from the Roblox game Spelling Bee – a lake in New England with the Algonquian name: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

The definition has something to do with fishing and loosely means “that which is a divided island lake.” There is a rather light and enjoyable alternate interpretation of the name: “You fish on your side, I fish on my side, nobody fishes in the middle.”

But for those who can’t master the 14-syllable/45-letter pronunciation or spelling (and, apparently, some people actually can do both), it’s permissible to use its other name – Webster Lake.

But what fun is that?

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net