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Words of the Year 2024

Words of the Year 2024

Last updated on: December 27, 2024 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Words of the Year 2024 2024-12-21T14:03:19-05:00 Gene Veith

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English Dictionaries have the custom of proclaiming a “word of the year,” new words or old words with new meanings that lexicographers believe reflect the time. Here are the words of the year from various dictionaries and what they tell us about 2024..

Brain rot

The Oxford Dictionary chose “brain rot.” That figure of speech can have lots of applications, but the meaning that had significance for the previous year is this: “(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

Or, as the London Telegraph‘s Anna Tyzack puts it, “the colloquial term used to describe excessive consumption of low-quality online content, particularly short videos on social media.” She quotes a psychologist:

“It’s like fast food – we used to have to hunt and gather and it’s the same with information,” says Dr Vigneshwar Paleri, a clinical psychologist specialising in neuropsychology at the London Neurocognitive Clinic. “Now we can get it whenever we want through artificial intelligence or video content, and our brains are suffering. The brain actually prefers focused, intellectual engagement. If we want to keep them healthy, we need to be aware of this and change our behaviour accordingly.”

Related concept: Doom scrolling. **: “**to spend excessive time online scrolling through news or other content that makes one feel sad, anxious, angry, etc.”

Manifest

The Cambridge Dictionary picked “manifest,” which it said was one of the most looked-up words of the year. Not in the sense of making something clear, but in this sense: “(verb [transitive]) To use methods such as affirmation and visualization to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.”

Celebrities, athletes, and TikTokers are all urging each other to “manifest your goals,” or “manifest your dreams,” or “manifest your victory.” Meaning visualize the outcome you want, keep repeating to yourself that it’s going to happen, and if you believe it hard enough, it will.

This is simply a secularized version of the Prosperity Gospel, the teaching that if you have enough faith, you can “name it and claim it,” with the help of “positive confessions” equivalent to “affirmations,” and God will give you what you want, including wealth and material possessions. Though associated mainly with Pentecostals, this belief has ties to the mainline Presbyterian minister Norman Vincent Peale and his teachings about the Power of Positive Thinking, which also include visualizations and affirmations. These beliefs are also connected to today’s postmodernism, the belief that truth is a construction of the mind.

Rev. Peale, by the way, was Donald Trump’s childhood pastor at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. I wonder if President-elect Trump manifested the election!

At any rate, those who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” are probably into “manifesting.”

Polarization

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary chose polarization, which it defined as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.”

That’s an insightful description. The editors say that the concept “happens to be one idea that both sides of the political spectrum agree on.”

But I wonder if we are as polarized as everybody keeps saying we are.

Illustration by Ron Mader, lines from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

political polarization

power of positive thinking

Prosperity Gospel

Words of the Year 2024

Previous Post

December 27, 2024

DISCUSS: Optimistic or Pessimistic?

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December 30, 2024 End of the Year Miscellany, 12/30/24

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