What connects the word “vape”, the crying-laughing emoji and the phrase “squeezed middle”? No, it’s not just a biting crossword clue for “millennial”: they have all previously been crowned word of the year. Admittedly, there are now so many “words of the year” that, if they were physical objects, they could make a decent-sized museum collection. Which, as it happens, is exactly how I like to imagine them – artefacts of their time, telling a story of a changing society.
This year’s winners – from “parasocial” (Cambridge Dictionary’s choice) to “rage bait” (Oxford English Dictionary), “67 (six-seven)” (Dictionary.com) and “slop” (Merriam-Webster) – will join the group, though where in the “museum” remains to be seen. Will they sit in the permanent collection, along with 2005’s “podcast” and 2015’s “binge-watch”? Or the archive, where irrelevances such as 2007’s “w00t” are packed off to, to see out their days alongside David Cameron’s lesser-remembered very bad idea: not Brexit (Collins, 2016), but “big society” (Oxford, 2010).
