The Collins Dictionary has named ‘brat’ its Word Of The Year. Not brat as in a naughty child, but ‘brat’ as in the title of an album by UK popstar Charli XCX. The Collins defines it as a ‘confident, independent and hedonistic attitude.’
They should perhaps have added ‘disreputable’. Charli XCX – I’ll call her Charli for short – describes brat attitude as being ‘a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra’, which to me has a definite air of naughtiness about it.
Whatever, it’s obviously meant to be seen as a virtue. During the US presidential campaign, Charli tweeted that ‘Kamala is brat’. Not that her endorsement helped the Democrat candidate.
Needless to say Charli is very young. She was born in 2002. I know plenty of people have been born since the turn of the millennium but I sometimes find it hard to believe they are now adults, earning money and becoming rich and famous, at least to those under….what? 40? 30? I’d never heard of her.
I’d never heard of this version of brat before either, but then I’d never heard of last year’s WOTY rizz, which was coined by another very young person of whom I’d never heard – the Youtuber Kai Cenat. Rizz, in case you’ve forgotten, means sexiness or star quality, and supposedly derives from charisma.
Speaking of Kai, that’s the name of one of Elon Musk’s children, one of the more normal ones. He’s also got Strider, Azure, Techno Mechanicus, X, and Exa Dark Siderael, now known as Y for short.
Charli XCX has picked up the same zeitgeist. What is it with these celebrities that they have to sound like characters from a video game or sci-fi fantasy? But I digress.
Other words that made the Collins shortlist include ‘era’, meaning an important period of your life or career. But apart from the Taylor Swift connection there’s nothing new or original about it.
Another surprising candidate was ‘yapping’, meaning the same as it always has. How did that get on the list? And ‘brainrot’ – an inability to think clearly caused by excessive consumption of online content. Surely that’s been around for ages as well.
A more interesting candidate was ‘delulu’, short for deluded, meaning mistaken or unrealistic in your expectations. I like this. It’s in the same tradition as whatever/whatevs and tomorrow/tomoz, and sorry/soz. I like this playful mucking around with common words. Makes them fresh and breezy.
Also on the list was ‘rawdogging’, meaning doing something without preparation, support, or equipment. And ‘looksmaxxing’ – getting the most out of your physical appearance. These are both pretty good, but a bit too niche to catch on, and I’m not just saying that because I haven’t heard of them.
There was also ‘romantasy’ – a genre combining romance with fantasy. OK, I suppose, but these portmanteau words are a dime a dozen these days: sitcom, romcom, chicklit, sci-fi, podcast, pubcast. (Yep, that’s a Thing: a podcast screened to an audience of drinkers.)
It’s the same with social trends. I came across a new one in a women’s mag the other day: a celebrity has a baby and says she and her husband will soon be off on their ‘babymoon’. Cute, but will it last?
Every now and then one such coinage does resonate and endure. ‘Bromance’ is one such – the friendship between straight men. Most recent high-profile example – Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Was bromance ever a WOTY? It should have been. It’s widely used and we all know what it means, unlike most of the Collins nominations!
Here’s my own short shortlist, from new words I’ve actually seen or heard of this past year.
There’s a movie about a train that’s been ‘hackjacked’ – ie its electronic systems have been hacked into and taken over. Good word. Precise and memorable.
Remember those ugly black balls that washed up on a Sydney beach? Originally thought to be tarballs but turned out to be ‘fatbergs’. ‘Fatberg’ is a terrific word, pungent with meaning if not particularly new. It was a giant fatberg that caused the cancellation of a Bryan Adams concert in Perth. That’s a fatberg at the top of this article.
My top candidate is ‘word salad’. How many times have we heard that one this year? It’s what politicians produce when trying to avoid difficult questions. Think Albo trying to explain what he did or didn’t do to get upgrades from Qantas. Or the bafflingly vague pep talks Kamala Harris was wont to deliver instead of articulating policy.
If it doesn’t get onto one of the Australian dictionary shortlists there is no justice.
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Shortly after this article was published in the New Norfolk News, the Australian National Directory declared ‘Colesworth’ its Word of the Year. As in Coles and Woolworths, of course.
I don’t like it. Not impressed at all. It’s a fairly obvious portmanteau construction of no particular ingenuity, but more to the point, nobody uses it! And I can speak with some authority on that because I’m an oldie who consumes news commentary every single day in newspapers, on radio and TV and online, and in all the brouhaha over the alleged misuse of market power by the supermarket duopoly I’ve never once heard anyone – journalist, commentator, politician, company exec, aggrieved member of the public – say it.
A better choice would have been runner-up YIMBY, as in Yes In My Backyard – a nifty, pithy riposte to NIMBY. Also-rans were ‘ute tax’ – a derogatory term for the new fuel efficiency standard, which is not bad, and ‘climate trigger’ – the requirement for an environmental impact assessment of any new development. That one’s a bit of a yawn, I reckon.
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Then it was the turn of The Macquarie Dictionary and its WOTY is ‘enshittification’ – the gradual decline in quality of a product or service, particularly an online service. They give the example of dating apps, where the initial worthy goal of matchmaking comes into conflict with the operators’ desire to make money. The free version is ‘enshittified’ so users will upgrade to the better paid version.
It’s a concept for which a word is needed, I admit, but I don’t like this one. In fact I hate the sound of all words based on the root ‘shit’, including the adjective ‘shitty’. Why? Possibly because all these derivatives of ‘shit’ tend to be used lazily and witlessly, and I associate them with an impoverished vocabulary.
Coming in a close second at Macquarie was ‘brainrot’, which as we’ve seen also featured in the Collins list as the result of excessive consumption of online content, but Macquarie defined it more broadly as referring to loosely defined and in some cases meaningless internet slang words such as looksmaxxing, mogging, sigma and skibidi.
Mogging is unhelpfully defined as part of the looksmaxxing trend, and has something to do with being, or trying to be, or thinking you are, more physically attractive than others.
A Sigma is a popular, successful and highly independent person, typically a male. They are one step above an alpha male, which is curious considering alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and sigma is 7th last.
Skibidi. This is the one that confirms I am old and irretrievably out of touch. I quote from The Definitive Guide to Gen A Slang Written by Actual Teens: “Skibidi” is a nonsense slang term popular with Gen Alpha. It has no set meaning and can refer to something good, cool, bad, or evil. “Skibidi toilet” is an animated series on YouTube that involves a war between human-head toilets and humans with devices for faces.
See? I kid you not.