1143. This week, we look at the 2025 words of the year with Jess Zafarris and Danny Hieber. We look at viral slang like "six seven" and cultural terms like "rage bait" and "fatigued." We also look at the dramatic rise of "slop" to describe low-quality AI content and how words like "parasocial" are changing function.
1143. This week, we look at the 2025 words of the year with Jess Zafarris and Danny Hieber. We look at viral slang like "six seven" and cultural terms like "rage bait" and "fatigued." We also look at the dramatic rise of "slop" to describe low-quality AI content and how words like "parasocial" are changing function.
Find Jess Zafarris at UselessEtymology.com, or find her podcast Words Unravelled on YouTube.
Find Danny Hieber at LingusiticDiscovery.com or on his Substack.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and it is word-of-the-year time. I'm so excited. It's my favorite time of year, and I have Jess Zafarris and Danny Hieber. Jess is from the Words Unraveled YouTube channel, and Danny is from the Linguistic Discovery YouTube channel. Welcome, both of you.
Jess Zafarris: Thank you so much for having me back on the show. This is my favorite time of year.
Danny Hieber: It's great to be here. Thank you.
Mignon Fogarty: Danny, yeah, first timer. We're just so excited to have you. And Danny, you made a spirited defense of “six seven” recently, so I would love to start with you and that word of the year from dictionary.com.
Danny Hieber: Sure. Yeah. As you might expect, a lot of people—I joked that both the Oxford Word of the Year and the dictionary.com word of the year were rage bait. Oxford's word of the year was “rage bait,” and a lot of people felt rage baited by “six seven” as the word of the year. And I think, yeah, there's a lot of reasons I saw it come up why people were upset about it. They didn't, they were like, it's not even a word. It's multiple words. It's like numbers rather than words. It's multiple words. It's a phrase, not a word. The most common one I saw was that it's going to be gone in a minute. You know, like it's a flash in the pan, and no one will ever use it again. So it started as kind of a long reply on Threads, and I was like, no, this would be an interesting newsletter issue. So I put that out and kind of explained some of those issues with it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, well, I mean the words of the year, they often are like flash—in fact, there are always some flash in the pans that you— I was looking at the words from last year to remind myself, and "brat" was one of the words of the year, and I don't think I've heard that since.
Danny Hieber: Yeah. Well, and you know, the thing about slang is kind of like biological species. Like most of the biological species on the planet have gone extinct and will go extinct. You know, there's a very small percentage of words that actually make it through. If you're into etymology, which we all are here, then you know that from any given Proto-Indo-European root, there are often like dozens or sometimes a lot of words that derive from a single root and it makes it seem like these ancient languages had very few words, but that's not the case. It's just that very few words actually survived. And so we're getting this sliver, this slice of those words. And same with slang. You know, there's one out of every hundred new slang words or something is going to survive and get legs, as it were. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and I mean, the words of the year, they always break down into sort of two types, too. There's the trendy words that came out of nowhere this year that suddenly you're hearing everywhere. And then there's the words with gravitas that are, you know, relevant to the current societal goings on and seem very important.
So, we always have both of those kinds of words. I thought it was really interesting. Actually, we are recording this on December 12th, on Friday, December 12th. And I saw just this morning the Austrian German youth word of the year was also “six seven,” so—
Danny Hieber: Oh, nice.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, apparently it's big in Austria too.
Danny Hieber: And I assume in English, too, not in German. Right. It was "six seven," not like "sechs seiban."
Mignon Fogarty: Right. Yeah. They're saying it with the English.
Danny Hieber: Interesting. Yeah, that's not too surprising because that's part of when you have cultural uptake of a phrase or something like that. The context in which you hear it is important, and the context includes which language you're hearing it in. So yeah, it just wouldn't have the same kind of cultural meaning if you said it in German or Spanish, probably.
Jess Zafarris: Because it's not about the numbers at all.
Danny Hieber: Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: No, but I did hear math teachers are incorporating "six seven" into their problem sets to get students more excited about math.
Jess Zafarris: My niece and nephews tell me that we've already moved past the era of trendiness on "six seven" because the adults got ahold of it, so it's just not cool anymore.
Mignon Fogarty: Good to know. I heard there's a hand gesture that goes with it. I won't bother learning it now.
Danny Hieber: A little tidbit I just learned about that yesterday. The way people are using emojis to make that gesture online. They're doing the hand-up and hand-down emoji.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Danny Hieber: Those two emojis were actually proposed by linguist Lauren Gawne from the Lingthusiasm podcast, and they were approved by the Unicode Consortium precisely because they were so versatile and being used as gestures. So it's kind of come full circle, like back to linguists and six seven.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that's great. Lauren's been a guest on the show too, talking about gestures. It was a wonderful episode, I think in this last year, in 2025.
Danny Hieber: Cool.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and speaking of the English words going into foreign countries. The German youth word of the year was “das crazy,” which also had the English version of the word. And I think there was a German word too that related to AI, right, Jess?
Jess Zafarris: That's right. It was, basically “AI era” in English, which I think “KI-Ära” is how you would say that. But it's the same thing as our phrase AI era. And that one was selected by the Society for the German Language, which was announced on Friday. The same notion is just that we have this also like this AI boom. Another term that has come up a lot in German, so I'm told, is "KI boom," which is AI boom. So here we have yet another, what they call a Denglish word, which is this pseudo-anglicized English, or German terms.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And no surprise, there are a lot of AI terms in the words of the year. I think the word you chose for PR Daily was "slop."
Jess Zafarris: It was the only choice, and I selected this months ago. I write their word-of-the-year article every year. I was disappointed that The Economist went with the one I did, but it was the only one that made sense because this is for communicators, people who work in PR, people who work in comms, and "slop" is the thing that they're up to their knees in right now. It is everywhere. And it's a problem too because it creates PR issues. It creates challenges. It also just makes your voice sound inauthentic and uninteresting, and readers can increasingly pick up on it.
So one of the things that I run into a lot when I write, when I ghostwrite for ad agency executives, is they tend to want to come up with executive quotes on the fly. So sometimes their comms person will AI-generate them a quote to be like, "We really like this campaign," but it reads like a robot every time. And I'm like, could you just tell me what you think about it, and I can write that down?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and it was the Macquarie Dictionary in Australia also chose "AI slop." A couple months ago, someone asked me what I thought the word should be, and I thought "slop" too. One of the things that I love about "slop," not the slop itself, but the word, is that it's so productive. So, I've been doing word watches all year on AI, and you have "sloperators." Those are people who publish "slop." There are, let's see, "slopoganda"
Jess Zafarris: That's a good one.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, AI-generated propaganda is “slopoganda.” "Slopographer" are people who make AI-generated images, and "slopportunists" are people who are taking advantage of slop. But then there is "sloptimism," which is also the feeling that respected outlets will get more attention, more trust, because they don't produce slop. So we have sloptimism.
Jess Zafarris: That's probably true, and I think the—
Danny Hieber: Has that crossed the part of speech boundary yet too? Is it being verbified yet?
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that's a great question. I imagine people are saying "slopping," but I haven't heard it. I actually haven't heard that.
Jess Zafarris: That one, so I can confirm. I do think this one will stick around. I think this word will continue to be relevant much in the same way that "spam" has remained relevant.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it fits and it's useful. Yeah. Another AI word was "vibe coding." That was the Collins Dictionary in the UK.
Jess Zafarris: Yeah, "vibe coding" is a slang term that was popularized by one of the OpenAI founders, and it describes how AI tools allow hobbyists to build websites and create blogs and command programming and coding capabilities through conversations. So it's coding by feeling, much to the chagrin of traditional coders. So you can say something like, "Make a blog," and it will yield that rather than you doing the work yourself.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Have either of you tried "vibe coding"?
Danny Hieber: I've always—I do some programming, and I've always used some of the AI-assisted tools, but I've not done anything that's like total vibe coding. It's more just like, "Help me rewrite this formula," you know, that kind of thing. Or function, rather.
Jess Zafarris: I have asked an AI tool to give me formatted HTML before to paste into a WordPress site.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, many years ago, I made an iOS game called Grammar Pop. You can't get it anymore, but I put a description of it into Lovable, one of the vibe coding apps, and it made a working demo in like five minutes. It had taken me four months to make a demo at that level, and I just sat and stared out the window for a long, long time. And then I—you know, it wouldn't be anything you could release. Like, I'm sure it had bugs and, you know, I would never release that to the world, but if you're making a prototype, I was like, "Wow, that's amazing and scary and depressing and just wild."
Do we have any other AI-related words? Oh, a Chinese dictionary, their most searched term was "Deepseek," which is probably the most famous Chinese AI model.
Jess Zafarris: That certainly makes sense. It is interesting how, to your point earlier, we almost have three categories this year, and that's AI and internet words, but AI-specific words, and then we have power structure words, and then we have chronically online words.
Mignon Fogarty: What are some fun power structure words this year? Oh, I like the ones from the Canadian English Dictionary. You know, Canada is obviously very unhappy with the United States right now, and so we have "elbows up" with the runners-up. After the Canadian tariffs were put on, the people in Canada started using "elbows up" as a way to talk about fighting back. That is a hockey term.
Jess Zafarris: It's so Canadian.
Danny Hieber: Yeah, I noticed also "maple washing," which I thought was really fun, which is kind of like presenting this sort of false vision or kind of narrative of a Canadian identity. But I also saw some people using that as representing products as being Canadian-made even when they aren't. You might, you know, put like a maple leaf on it to make it seem like, "Oh, this is made in Canada," but it in fact isn't. And so people have been more aware and irritated by that when they're seeing it.
Mignon Fogarty: That parallels greenwashing.
Jess Zafarris: Exactly.
Danny Hieber: Right? Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Is that "rage bait"?
Jess Zafarris: Which, I mean, "rage bait" is also a spinoff of "click bait," too. So we've got multiple layers here.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. The thing I like about "rage bait" that the editor pointed out is that because we have a word for it, now we can—it shows that people are recognizing it more, so it's not—people aren't being tricked by "rage bait" anymore. They're naming it and saying, "Oh, this is just intended to make me angry. This is rage bait." As opposed to maybe, sometimes they can say that instead of just getting angry.
Danny Hieber: Now that we've got "click bait" and "rage bait," and I know there are a couple of other cases of context I've seen that. It wouldn't surprise me if "bait" eventually became what was called like a "lib fix," where it gets reanalyzed as a suffix that can then be productively applied to new words with its own reading. That would be fun. That would be a good prediction of a future word of the year is like a suffix meaning "bait."
Jess Zafarris: If I ran a bookstore, I would totally have page bait all over the store. Here's some page bait for you.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice.
Jess Zafarris: So that’s a word for, like, low-quality fiction.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it's like “gate,” like “Watergate.” However, every scandal is now a gate. Yeah. Lib fix. Well, are we “fatigued” by AI and rage bait? That's the Glassdoor word of the year. That's a job and recruiting site.
Jess Zafarris: I feel that in my bones.
Danny Hieber: I’m sure that’s a very relevant to Glassdoor too, just because the job hunting process is so exhausting these days because of AI.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. “Affordability” was another one of the words that a lot of the people on their site that was one of the runners-up.
Jess Zafarris: You can really feel the anxiety here.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Japan has a different kind of anxiety. This just came out this morning. Their kanji of the year is “bear,” like for the animal, because there's been an increase in bear attacks in Northern Japan. Yeah. They're dealing with a lot.
Jess Zafarris: Do you know why there have been an in, there's been an increase in bear attacks?
Mignon Fogarty: No, I read the article, but there was no additional information about why the bears are suddenly so angry. Maybe there's bear rage bait.
Jess Zafarris: Bear bait. Wait. No, that was actually a thing.
Mignon Fogarty: What was it?
Jess Zafarris: Bear baiting was like a terrible blood sport from bygone eras.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, yeah.
Jess Zafarris: So, goodness gracious.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh. Well, let's see. Another foreign one. Oh, The Economist said the clear winner for foreign word of the year was, and I'm not going to know how to pronounce this, I'd say “neijuan,” N-E-I-J-U-A-N, Mandarin for "involution." What I loved about this is it's become a term used by workers to refer to the sense of running ever faster on a treadmill to get nowhere. And just a couple weeks ago, I did a show about "hamster wheel" versus "rat race." So, it looks like China is having the same feelings.
Danny Hieber: And that term works so well in English too. Like, I could see that being adopted into English and picking up frequency here too.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Yeah. What was another? Recently, what? “Lie flat.” That was another work-related word from Asia.
Jess Zafarris: What was the meaning on that one?
Mignon Fogarty: On “lie flat?
Jess Zafarris: Like, what is the significance?
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that is, I think, if I remember right, it's like resisting work. So it came out of the feeling of overwork, and in such said, there's like lie flat and not work.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I did a poll on the Grammar Girl Facebook page, and we have some winners there. So, the one that got the most votes was “liminal.” That was from Yuen Thum. She described it as a word for that threshold moment—the space between two versions of yourself, no longer the old you, but not yet the new.
Jess Zafarris: I swear to God that Bo Burnham is responsible for popularizing this term in younger circles because his Socko sketch used it significantly. And then I swear to God, TikTok got a hold of it and then Reddit got a hold of it more. Reddit was already playing around in that space because there was already a liminal spaces subreddit. But TikTok didn't seem to know the word "liminal" until after Bo Burnham.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that's great, because I was wondering where it came from. It seemed like an odd winner to me.
Jess Zafarris: And it's grown in popularity since then. There are a couple of references to Bo Burnham-isms from his Inside... What was it? It's not a sketch; it's a performance piece that he created during the pandemic.
Mignon Fogarty: I like it because it's one of the most hopeful of the words on our list.
Jess Zafarris: Though it's dark in context. The notion is he has this sock puppet named Socko, who expresses anxiety about the state of the world and says that he lives in a state of a liminal space between life and death, which is a permanent space of sleep paralysis.
Mignon Fogarty: Darn it. I was hoping it was hopeful. Another one, the people, some of the people made videos to go with their submissions, and the "sycophants" video by Susan Autry was particularly good. What I loved about it is that she was reading the definition of "sycophants" from the dictionary, and then she grabbed another dictionary and said, "Always get more than one source."
Jess Zafarris: The origin of that word is really fun. I am sure it won't be a surprise to either of you, but it means. .. it's related to the word for "fig," and it relates to throwing the fig—a gesture that was used in Greece and Rome for usually to describe poorly behaved people who are supporters of popular political figures. And if you were throwing the fig, you were an unpleasant type of this sort of person. But that also is quite relevant today, right?
Mignon Fogarty: Right. Yeah.
Jess Zafarris: Just people being badly behaved sycophants for popular figures.
Mignon Fogarty: And then the final one was, again, “affordability” from Cindy Stotchen-Hockman.
Danny Hieber: And that’s even become, even in the past, what is it, like a week or so, suddenly that word is all over the news now too. So, and I think it was, it's been more frequent and more relevant for most of the year, and then all of a sudden in the past two weeks, it has blown up even more so.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and that's why.
Jess Zafarris: Christmas groceries and fainting at their receipts.
Danny Hieber: Right. Well, and then there's the controversy about the cost of Walmart's Thanksgiving feasts this year and whatnot. How it was like cheaper, but it was different items. Yeah. So, you know, it's like the whole holidays has really intensified the attention to it.
Mignon Fogarty: Absolutely. Yeah, let's see, and now, you know, we are recording this a little early. It's funny because we always complain that the words of the year come out so early. And so I scheduled this early, and now Merriam-Webster hasn't come out with their word yet. So we'll have that to look forward to. We can't tell you what it is, but maybe it'll be out by the time this runs. And then in January, we always have the American Dialect Society Words of the Year, which is always just a really fun list. So those are upcoming.
Danny Hieber: Have either of you gotten to attend the ADS selection process for that?
Mignon Fogarty: Not in person. When they allowed live streaming during the pandemic, I always went because it’s really fun.
Danny Hieber: Yeah, no, it's great fun, and it's very much just based on vibes. It is not a scientific process whatsoever, but it's, you know, a bunch of linguists that kind of just sit in a room, throw out ideas, and vote on what they think, you know, words are representative. And I think it does, you know, there's a lot of back and forth about whether like, oh, should it represent a cultural trend? Should it represent something that's actually linguistically significant, like a grammatical shift or something? And I think everyone's got different opinions, and that's what makes it fun. You just get to kind of choose from among all of the ones that people find interesting.
Mignon Fogarty: It was really fun to listen in and hear how chaotic it was and everything. And then as the perspective, because then Ben Zimmer does this amazing job where going out to talk to the media about the words, and it makes them sound, I don't know, much more—not important, but like deliberative than maybe it is.
Danny Hieber: Yeah, like the weight of authority of the American Dialect Society. And you know, to be fair, everyone there is linguists and we are, we're all very attentive to the language around us, and we're being observant about it and whatnot. But it's not—we're not like using corpus linguistics like Merriam-Webster or dictionary.com is, you know.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I'd love to go some year. Well, I thought to wrap up, we could talk about, we could go through the 2024 words of the year and we can think, like, have any of them…are any of them still relevant? Are, you know, are, how do we feel about maybe what the one we would carry over from last year into this year? So we had “brain rot,” “demure,” “brat,” which we mentioned, “manifest,” “polarization,” “kakistocracy,” “enshitification,” “aura,” and “vibes.”
Jess Zafarris: It is interesting. We've gone from “kakistocracy” to one of them this year was another "ocracy." What was it? “Pathocracy.” That's right. From meaning like with "pathos" being the main notion there. So rule by people who are pathological.
Mignon Fogarty: So from corrupt to pathological.
Jess Zafarris: Yes, indeed. This one, that word actually dates back to the 1950s. One of the—there was a Polish psychiatrist who popularized that term and studied it in detail. And it's interesting because according to his research, the transition to pathocracy happens when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. And some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and the irresponsibility of them and their followers. Then they also appear to some psychologically normal individuals who find this person charismatic. It's interesting.
Mignon Fogarty: The examples he gave were the Third Reich, apartheid, and slavery. Yeah, we missed that one. That was a good word. We also missed, I moved, jumped forward too fast. We missed “parasocial,” which is actually another from Cambridge Dictionary.
Jess Zafarris: And one that I think all three of us have probably experienced to some degree.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Apparently.
Danny Hieber: With each other.
Jess Zafarris: Yeah, exactly.
Mignon Fogarty: I know. So, the—yeah, they said the dictionary saw a surge in people looking up the word after the YouTube star IShowSpeed blocked an obsessive fan as his number one parasocial. But this has an AI twist too. So when I first heard "parasocial," I thought that doesn't feel like a new word to me. Like I was talking about that back in 2015, 2016. But apparently it now also applies to the idea of AI companions. So, some people are describing the relationships people have with those AI bots as parasocial relationships, and that's one of the reasons it's increased in use.
Jess Zafarris: There's an interesting subreddit called, I believe it's "My Boyfriend Is AI," and people are genuinely having relationships with their chatbot friends. The interesting part of that too was there was an update that erased some of those personalities, and those people went through serious psychological challenges as a result of that, which was that it was just really interesting to observe.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that's been growing. It is really interesting. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that.
Danny Hieber: One thing I kinda like about cases like “parasocial” is that's a word that's been around for like a decade now. Well, at least in popular discourse as internet and social media has created more of what we label as parasocial relationships. But I love cases where the same word's been around for a while, but it's shifted in its meaning and its use. So if I had been attentive to word of the year back in like two thousand, what, five, six, when Facebook became publicly available, I probably would've chosen "to friend" as a verb. Right? Because prior to that, you said either "befriend" as the verb or "friend" as a noun. There was no "friend" as a verb. And now it has a, you know, specific use in the context of social media.
So I like cases like that where it's a word that has shifted its function over time, whether it be like grammatical function or its meaning. And so “parasocial” is kind of another use of that. When I first saw it, I was surprised. Like that word's been around forever. You know, why does that—? And then I looked into it, and I was like, oh, I see. So it's actually kind of shifting its use again; it's being used for AI more so. It is relevant in a whole new way again.
Jess Zafarris: Yeah, and it’s a different degree of separation, right? The "para" element of it being a different degree of separation than the one between fans and public figures.
Danny Hieber: Right, right.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, I imagine we will all be on our various channels talking about the Merriam-Webster word of the year and the American Dialect Society words of the year, and any other interesting ones that pop up in the next few weeks. So where can people find you?
Jess Zafarris: I'm on YouTube in another podcast called "Words Unraveled," which is etymology-focused with my friend and cohost Rob Watts, and then you can find me on TikTok at Jess Zafarris and in bookstores.
Mignon Fogarty: Yay. What book is out now?
Jess Zafarris: "Useless Etymology" is my most recent one, and it is also my favorite one that I have written.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, nice. I liked it too.
Danny Hieber: It's my favorite of yours too.
Jess Zafarris: Oh, thank you.
Mignon Fogarty: And Danny, where can people find you?
Danny Hieber: I am Linguistic Discovery on all the social media platforms, and I also run a newsletter at LinguisticDiscovery.com or on Substack. And so, that should be picking up steam a little more this year. So, tune into that, give that a follow if you want to get more on the science and diversity of linguistics.
Mignon Fogarty: It’s fantastic. I love your channel. Yeah.
Danny Hieber: I appreciate that.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So, well, thank you for being here. Have a great holiday season, and we're going for the Grammarpaloozians, we're going to have book recommendations as a bonus episode. So stay tuned for that if you are one of our supporters, and we appreciate it very much.