Do you like to go full goblin and luxuriate in your own filth?
(Picture: Paramount Pictures)Sinking into your sofa under a blanket stained with tomato from takeaway pizza – the crusts of which are long cold in the box on the floor but you’ll probably eat them later. Gormlessly watching Too Hot To Handle with no sense of irony. Making no plans to do anything as productive as, say, brushing your teeth or leaving the house.
If you can relate to any of the above, chances are you’re familiar with “goblin mode”, Oxford University Press’s Word Of The Year 2022 – and the first to be chosen by the public.
Making up 93 per cent of the overall vote — beating both “metaverse“ and “#IStandWith” — “goblin mode” is a slang term defined, according to Oxford Univrsity Press, as “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.”
The term appears to have been coined some 13 years ago, on Twitter in 2009, but it went viral in early 2022 –as a mocked-up headline on a non-existent story about Julia Fox and Kanye West. Twitter user @Juniper tweeted what appeared to be a screenshot of an article on Bollywood news site Pinkvilla with the headline: “Julia Fox opened up about her ‘difficult’ relationship with Kanye West: ‘He didn’t like when I went goblin mode’.”
It garnered more than 100,000 likes and the ‘story’ was picked up by major media outlets, resulting in discourse about how easy fake news can spread. It has since become increasingly popular as a response to our collective post-Covid funk, whereby employing goblin mode is kind of an admission that the ‘real world,’ with all of its standards around aesthetics, hygiene, politeness, and productivity, is simply too much to cope with.
Goblin mode is also thought to be a kickback against the curated immaculateness of social-media platforms. Those in goblin mode are tired of the effort of perfection and have willingly gone into reverse: luxuriating in their own filth, base needs, and unsavoury habits.
We can see its prevalence not only in the thousands of hashtags dedicated to it on Instagram but also in the rise in popularity of platforms like BeReal, which demand unedited normalcy from users, and in the increasing ridicule of trends like ‘sad beige’, which champion muted, tasteful, camera-ready aesthetics.
Responding to the news, Twitter users were split into those who admitted they didn’t know the phrase and those who had fully embraced goblin mode and thought it was the perfect way to sum up 2022. One user wrote, “For once, I feel trendy and in keeping with the times.”
Goblin mode is truly a whole mood which is one of the main criteria for The Oxford Word of the Year, which are always reflective of the interests or preoccupations of the past 12 months. Not only this, the chosen word will have been used frequently and promise staying power.
“Given the year we’ve just experienced, ‘Goblin mode’ resonates with all of us who are feeling a little overwhelmed at this point,” says Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages and academic product director at Oxford University Press (OUP). “It’s a relief to acknowledge that we’re not always the idealised, curated selves that we’re encouraged to present on our Instagram and TikTok feeds… People are embracing their inner goblin, and voters choosing ‘goblin mode’ as the Word of the Year tells us the concept is likely here to stay.”
Previous Oxford Words Of The Year
Credit crunch (2008)
When we plunged into recession, our conversations and news cycles were dominated by the financial sector, making ‘credit crunch’ the obvious choice for Word Of The Year.
Selfie (2013)
A niche social-media tag which evolved into a mainstream term for a self-portrait photograph. See Kim Kardashian’s influence for more details.
Crying with laughter emoji (2015)
Controversially not even a word, this emoji was chosen because it was the most used globally in 2015.
Toxic (2018)
No longer simply a poisonous substance but a morally destructive person or behaviour, ‘toxic’ captured the year’s reckoning with sexual harassment and the power of the patriarchy brought into the spotlight by the #MeToo movement.
Vax (2021)
Covid vaccines or – the vax – was seemingly all anyone could talk about in 2021. “A relatively rare word in our corpus until this year, by September it was over 72 times more frequent than at the same time last year,” said the team at Oxford.
