Front Porch: The 2024 words of the year leave this writer a bit befuddled

Here I sit, in the early days of 2025, when thoughts should be on starting anew, working on crisp and hopeful resolutions and cleaning up after all the merriment of the past weeks.

But rather, I am most preoccupied with my box of tissues, my nose is red and sore, I’ve set a personal record for consecutive sneezes, my sinuses are producing more guck than I knew was possible and I feel like crud.

Welcome to the hard cold that just about everyone I know has had (husband included), is experiencing now or is likely to have before long. And on the day I am writing these words, it’s also my birthday.

Is it too late to throw open a window and shout “bah humbug” to the world?

I’m not big on resolutions at the new year, but as a person who has made a living most of my life with the use of words, I usually delight at year’s end by the lists of words or phrases of the year put out by various lexicological organizations, populated by assorted people who study language and its evolution and create dictionaries, often adding words, as usage patterns change.

Words of the year are considered a linguistic time capsule that reflect year-defining social trends and global events. Savoring them is a kid-in-a-candy-shop experience for me, which I share annually with readers, a number of whom are word-nerds just like I am. And this year, I admit I am getting more and more baffled by the words chosen, possibly exacerbated by my darn cold and my advancing years. If I have ever been hip or trendy, I’m long past that now.

Here I am, hugging those tissues and no longer in familiar territory when examining the words off the year, which I had always understood, up until now.

I have noticed in the past decade how the words and phrases of the year have been linked more and more to the world of information technology, most particularly social media. I thought it was kind of sweet when, in 2015 and we were attaching little scribbles to our emails, the Oxford Dictionaries picked the word “emoji” as its word of the year.

We do like our smiley faces.

But now we’re deep in, possibly inundated. Take for example Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2024 – “demure.”

What? No really. When Dictionary.com’s lexicographers did their analysis, “demure” stood out, based on searches for the word. Interest apparently came from viral videos put out last summer by TikToker Jools Lebron in which she describes her makeup routine as “very demure, very mindful.”

There’s some history to that, but I’ll leave it to interested readers to research further. Personally, I’m left befuddled.

Then there’s Cambridge Dictionary’s choice of “manifest” as its word of the year. Popularized by British singer Dua Lipa (as well as American gymnast Simone Biles), it refers to – and I have to quote from Cambridge’s news release – “… the practice of using methods such as visualization and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.”

Lipa said she has envisioned since childhood performing at the Glastonbury Festival, and focused on that all her life. That appearance actually happened this year. Biles said in an interview that when it comes to a goal, “you have to write it down, you have to speak it into existence, you have to say it daily and then it usually happens.”

I’m not discounting the power of manifestation in a person’s success journey, but as the 2024 word of the year? Not so sure about that.

I better understand “brain rot” as a universally understood choice by Oxford Dictionaries. Their language experts came up with a shortlist of words and then put them to a vote by the public. As they defined it here, brain rot is the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content. Especially on social media.

Interesting side note: The first recorded use of the term was in 1854 in American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau’s book “Walden,” in which he criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas in favor of simple ones, seeing it as a general decline in intellectual effort. He wrote: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Oxford notes that the term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.

“Polarization” is the choice of Merriam-Webster Dictionaries, clearly understood when looking at politics in 2024.

And I have to close with Collins Dictionary’s pick – “brat.” We did hear the word appear briefly during campaigning for the presidency last summer, and it’s another choice from popular culture of a certain generation. Charli XCX, an English singer and songwriter, has a song with that title in her sixth studio album (I had to look it up, as I had no clue). It has created an aesthetic, mostly through TikTok, about being hedonistic and rebellious, about partying through a breakdown, being honest, blunt and a bit volatile.

I’m sure there’s a lot more to explore about these words being standard bearers of evolution in our language, but I think it’s an appropriate time to abandon my exploration into the word-of-the-year selections for the year just ended. If I were voting today, however, my personal choice would be “brain fatigue.”

And I really do need to take a nap now.

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