907. The fabulous Kory Stamper, author of "Word by Word," joins me this week to talk about words of the year: how they get chosen, what makes each one different, and what people yearn for in their words of the year.
907. The fabulous Kory Stamper, author of "Word by Word," joins me this week to talk about words of the year: how they get chosen, what makes each one different, and what people yearn for in their words of the year.
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/words-or-the-year/transcript
My guest is Kory Stamper, author of "Word by Word, the Secret Life of Dictionaries."
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Mignon:
Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules and other cool stuff. And today we are on other cool stuff because I'm here with Kory Stamper, writer extraordinaire, wordy expert, used to work at Merriam-Webster, and we are going to talk about words of the year. Kory, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Kory:
Thanks so much for having me.
Mignon:
You bet. Oh, and I forgot to mention your book, "Word by Word, the Secrets of Making the Dictionary," something like that.
Kory:
"The Secret Life of Dictionaries," but yeah, I mean, close enough
Mignon:
Yeah, it's
Kory:
All the same
Mignon:
a fabulous book, because you were one of the people who write the dictionary, right?
Kory:
I, yeah, I was. I am. I still do, so...
Mignon:
Oh, you do? Oh, fabulous. I didn't know that. You do.
Yeah.
Wonderful. Well, we're looking forward to your future books, but this one will have to hold us over and, um, by the way, people, it would make a wonderful Christmas gift.
Kory:
I agree. Heartily
Mignon:
So, words of the year. I feel like this has become a major PR event for December.
Kory:
It sure has.
Mignon:
Do you ... it feels to me like it's become a bigger deal over the years. Is that just my impression, or do you feel like that's true too?
Kory:
No, I do think that that's true. I mean, just so that we have ... just for disclosure purposes ... I will say that I have worked for many dictionary companies, and in some of those companies, I've been a part of the word-of-the-year team, so just so everyone knows. But yeah, I do think that it's been more and more, it does seem like there's a huge PR push, and I think part of it is that the words of the year, when they first started happening, people just really loved them. They thought, "Oh, this is a great little commentary on how the year has gone." And everyone's got a different angle on how the year has gone because we're all very different people. So it has gotten to be, I think, a bigger thing. There's even sort of this arms race of who releases their word first. And it's kind of like in the US with the primary system here in our elections, like who gets to have the first caucus or primary and
Mignon:
Yeah. I'm doing a bracket this year for the first time, and I realize I started far too late. I should have started a month earlier. We're gonna be done, you know, the end of December, maybe early January. By the time of the voting comes in nobody's going to care anymore.
Kory:
Right? Right.
Mignon:
Kory:
But that's okay because as the American Dialect Society, which is a big group of people who are interested in the English language, as they like to say, they have their word-of-the-year vote in January because they want the whole year to finish out. They want all of December to take into the calculus too. So you're not that late. You're okay.
Mignon:
That's true.
Kory:
You're going to come in before the American Dialect Society does. So ...
Mignon:
I will, and actually that ... let's talk about the different ways the voting happens because, you know, the dictionaries do it very differently from the American Dialect Society, and actually differently from how I'm doing it this year. So can you talk about the pros and cons of the different ways of managing the vote?
Kory:
Sure. So just so everyone understands sort of how the different ways this works, the American Dialect Society, basically at their meeting, they open the floor and they say, okay, we have a bunch of different categories. So for instance, most likely to succeed, or most topical, or sort of word of the year in politics, word of the year, globally — they have all these categories, and at the physical meeting, they open the floor, and you nominate your words there, and you give a little spiel about why your word should be added to the nominations. And then they vote on them live right there. So that's how the American Dialect Society does theirs. And different dictionary companies have done similar things online. So there have been years where, Mirriam-Webster, for instance, had one year where people could nominate and vote on the word of the year.
This year, Oxford Dictionaries did the same thing. They had a, they kind of took a bunch of words and had people vote on them, but then you have the other end of the spectrum, which is you have dictionary companies looking at their historical lookup logs. So when you visit a dictionary website and you type in a word that gets dinged in a little, you know, little document somewhere else, and at the end of the year, we can see every word that's been looked up that year. And sometimes you find that news will drive lookups like mad, so you'll have news about something, and then everyone's looking up a piece of vocabulary from that news story. And after a while we started noticing that some of these patterns recur. Some of them are so significant that they have a big spike, and then they have a lot of lookups through the rest of the year, or they're overwhelmingly looked up all the time.
And so most dictionary companies, commercial dictionary companies, will sort of look at those lookups and they'll say, you know, we had a lot of these lookups, so this might be our word of the year. And sometimes dictionary companies just sort of look at all of their new words and say, you know, this is the word that we feel like best encompasses the zeitgeist. This is what, how we feel like the year has gone. Or this is the word that seems to be getting the most traction, you know, among our users, or seems to be a thing that a lot of people resonate with. So those are kind of different methodologies of the word of the year, which means that when we talk about the word of the year, we're really talking about the words of the year. And, and we're talking about a very small number of words of the year.
Mignon:
Yeah. It's been fascinating to me to see the different winners. Do you have a favorite so far of the — we'll talk about all the words — but do you have a favorite of the collection that have come out so far?
Kory:
I mean, they're all so different. I think one of the things I've noticed about the ones that have come out so far is we had a couple of years where it was all sort of politically-based words, or it was a lot of COVID-related words. And this year we're sort of moving out of COVID, which is very interesting. I actually, ah, I'm gonna catch some flack for this
Yeah.
Which is Oxford's word of the year. So "goblin mode" is one of these words that got voted on by people. They had a whole list of potential words, and they said vote on them. And "goblin mode" made it. And part of why I like "goblin mode" is, well, maybe we should define "goblin mode" for people. Should we do that first?
Mignon:
Yeah.
Kory:
Right? I mean, it has a couple of different shades of meaning. So I think that the Oxford meaning is "unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy." So that's a pretty broad range of potential things to be. Part of why I like "goblin mode" is a ... I do like these that are chosen by the public, and there are pros and cons to that. But I like the idea of saying, "Look, here's a whole list. Tell me what you think is most trenchant."
Mignon:
Kory:
And I like that. I like "goblin mode" because it's word play. And I feel like people love sort of getting their mitts into the English language and just like Play-Doughing it up. And I think that that's one of the things about goblin mode — it's a little bit refreshing after ... in previous years we've had words like "democracy" or "socialism" or "vax" or, you know, "COVID", you know, these very heavy, big terms. And "goblin mode" is a thing that, like you said, you say it and immediately a picture comes to mind whether that picture is correct or not. Like you just sort of know, "Oh, goblin mode. Yes, I've been there."
Yeah.
So I like it because it's just wordplay.
Mignon:
Great. One thing I saw a lot about "goblin mode" is a lot of people hadn't heard it before.
Um Right.
That it was completely new to them. And they're saying, "Where did this come from?" I think I had heard it before, but I had never used it and I, it wasn't a common word in my mind. Had you heard it before?
Kory:
Right? I had heard it, but really I kind of, I had heard it in like online slang kind of thing. And I always kind of relegated it to like gaming gamer stuff, which I'm not a gamer, so if I'm wrong, send all of those angry emails directly to me, not to Grammar Girl. But, um ...
Mignon:
No, I think I heard it was popular on Reddit too.
Kory:
Yeah. Yeah. So I had heard it, but also it's my job to go hunting for words like this. So of course, I I'm probably more familiar with it than other people might be. But I think it's funny that you can have a word that ends up being the word of the year that so few people have heard, but which resonates with you nonetheless, whether you like it or not. Like people have had a reaction to "goblin mode"
Mignon:
Yeah. And I think I started using it. It is a useful thing. And I guess another thing to talk about, another bit of feedback I've gotten is people said, "Well, 'goblin mode' is two words. How can that be the word of the year?" I know that comes up every year with these things. So can you, as a lexicographer, can you explain?
Kory:
I am happy to explain. I mean, first "word of the year" is just a lot catchier than "lema" or "lexical unit" of the year. So when we talk about words, what we mean when we talk about words as lexicographers is we're talking about a unit of meaning that carries a distinct semantic meaning. So you can say for instance, that "climate emergency," which I also think was a word of the year a couple of years ago. And no one threw their hands up about that being two words because we understand that "climate emergency" is itself describing a particular thing. And so we would say that "climate emergency" is a word for dictionary purposes. I have to say. I mean, I've been a lexicographer now for, oh boy, almost 25 years. And the a constant complaint is that, how can you say it's a word if it's more than one word? A word just in dictionary speak, just refers to something that has a specific meaning. So "goblin" has its own meaning; "mode" has its own meaning. "Goblin mode" has a different meaning than the combination of those two meanings.
Mignon:
Perfect. Thank you. And you know, we were talking about the different processes for coming up with words. It's interesting because "goblin mode," when I started, my bracket was 64 words, and "goblin mode" was eliminated in the first round, but it won Oxford's. It overwhelmingly won their vote. And, about Covid as well. We had seven or eight words in the initial round. We're down to the elite eight. And the only one left is "long COVID." And most of them were eliminated in the first round too. So people are not glomming on to the COVID words like they used to.
Kory:
I think it's interesting because when you allow people to have, sort of, an end-of-year lookback, "tell us what the word of the year is" kind of input, there is this interesting ... so there's a thing that happens in film, it's called a dolly zoom. Everyone has seen one where the camera is moving towards the (I might get this reversed) the camera is moving toward a person as the shot pulls back. So it's that thing where a person stands in one spot, and it seems like the walls retreat from them. It's usually used in horror, things like that. I feel like when you do a word of the year like this, you ask people to reflect on it. It's a dolly zoom, right? They sit in the middle and sort of everything expands around them, but they're still the focus. And so what's interesting to me is people are tired of talking about COVID. So it's not surprising then that "long COVID" is the only one that made it to the Elite Eight. people are, you know, people don't think "goblin mode" encompasses their year because we want, we want our year to be something that's like meaningful.
Mignon:
Right.
Kory:
You know, you don't wanna be like my word of the year was, you know, I don't even like "goblin mode." Like I was lazy and slovenly all year long. We want our words of the year to be these soaring, soaring sentiments. And, and so, you know, I think that's an interesting phenomenon when people, when you have to think about distilling your entire, your experience of the year and your observations of the world around you for the last year, and distill it down into one word. I think people are most likely going to choose sort of a higher concept, bigger word than something that's like, oh, "goblin mode." It comes out of gaming, and I'm a gamer and so I'm gonna say "goblin mode."
Mignon:
That's one thing I was going to ask you about because I noticed in my groups of words, there were two, at least two different classes and they were the higher, more concept-oriented words, like you said, like "democracy" in the past. And we had "fatigue" and "trauma" and
Kory:
I mean, it, it kind of goes either way, which I think is interesting. So the thing about naming a word that describes a thing like "supply chain," as a word of the year is that this sort of signals like this is the overarching or underlying reason that our year has been this way. And you can say that, you know, I think that's interesting because when you do that, you'll automatically get people who say, that's not how my year was.
Mignon:
Kory:
Yeah. Or that's a bad; that's a bad word. That's usually what you get like, that was a terrible choice. And I think the big soaring words when they get chosen, part of what's interesting about that is that it reignites a conversation about what that word means. So a word like "fatigue" or "trauma," especially those are, those are words that have a whole wide variety of applications and you're gonna be to, so if you were to, you know, "trauma," let's say ended up winning the word of the year (which would, that would, that'd be a story in and of itself), but if it did, that's a thing that has all these different applications. It has a very particular application and psychology and psychiatry, but it's a word that's sort of seeped into the general use in a way that is both comforting to some people and controversial to other people. And it provides a point of discussion. Right. It's an inflection point for you to reflect around your own experience of the year. And so I think what's interesting is sometimes if you have too many of one and not enough of the other people, long for the other one.
Mignon:
Mm-hmm.
Kory:
There was a period of time while I was at Marion Webster where high-concept, big words kept being sort of the top of the charts. So you'd have, you know, "democracy" was one, one year, "socialism" was one. And these are words that are that spawn very interesting conversations. But there was also a point where people were kinda like,
Can we just have a silly word of the year? I mean
Mignon:
The whole year of ...
Kory:
Yeah.
Mignon:
So
Kory:
It's an interesting balance because I think the word of the year ultimately is a public relations thing. It's a thing that we have information that you might like to know, and we'll tell you some of it, but it's not a thing that you should take as gospel truth. Like we're not saying this is the way that everyone should think about this year. And if you don't think about this year this way, then you weren't a part of whatever group
Mignon:
And speaking of the, the sort of the PR value of the word, I want to talk about dictionary.com's word of the year because they chose "woman." And I have to say immediately when I saw that I thought they are such panders!
Kory:
I do remember that. Yep.
Mignon:
Kory:
Mignon:
Definitely. Yeah. I know, they were really leaning into it; it was so interesting. Yeah. And it reminded me too, something you said earlier about the difference that I'm seeing between different groups. So, because I'm doing my brackets all over social media, I'm doing them on TikTok and LinkedIn for example, and wow, are those results different
Kory:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean this is a thing that is, that I think is the story behind the stories of the words of the year, which is who are the people that are looking these words up? I mean, especially not to be a bummer, but you know, lots of people just now use a very famous search engine who, I'm not gonna use their name
Mignon:
That's sad.
Kory:
They are better.
But I think that means then that the people who are going to dictionary websites are going to dictionary websites because they want an authoritative dictionary source. Right. And that's a particular group of people, and it's not the broad spectrum sort of people that used to use print dictionaries 30 years ago or 40 years ago. It's very different now. So it's not surprising to me to hear that your own listener base is sort of like, well the TikTok folks like this, and the LinkedIn people like this, and the people on Twitter like this,
And so I'm not probably going to be, you know, I'm gonna be looking at job posts, or I'm gonna be updating my resume or my CV or I'm, you know, I'm networking. I'm not going to think, "Oh yeah, 'long COVID' is definitely the word of the year. I'm already going be thinking about inflation, recession, I'm going to be thinking about all of these financial business type terms. If I'm on TikTok, I'm going think inflation is not, like that's not what TikTok is for.
Mignon:
And you're primed to value different kinds of words when you've entered that environment.
Kory:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The where we are in, in sort of either online space or physical space or you know, life space or whatever, that all influences what we think of the language, especially when you remove language from its context, right. When you're just saying, "Okay, here are two words,"
Mignon:
Right. And I mean that's what happens at the American Dialect Society is people get to make arguments for which word they think it should be. And you can see the vote being swayed by people making a particularly good argument.
Kory:
Yeah, absolutely. It's actually so fascinating to just watch the vote. Now I know that the ADS is doing something slightly different this year. I think they are going to have an online ballot in addition to the in-person nominations. But it is really fascinating to watch to see sort of
Mignon:
I do too. It's been one of the great things about the pandemic, one of the few great things, is that you can now virtually attend, and I was never able to go in person before. So I've loved participating in the last couple of years.
Kory:
Oh yeah. Oh, it's great. It's my favorite tv. It's great.
Mignon:
Yeah.
Kory:
Mignon:
Cause the
Kory:
Solution changes every day, for "homer." And it's an interesting story too because sometimes the things that take us to the dictionary are not these hard-hitting big, you know, "What is democracy? Who gets to call themselves a woman?" It's, you know, I'm doing Wordle. I'm doing a word game, and I have never seen this solution before. How very dare are they think that this is a usable word. So Cambridge Dictionaries chose "homer" because it was their biggest lookup, and it was an entirely because of a word game.
Mignon:
Kory:
Mm-hmm.
Mignon:
Yeah. You know, it's in my group. It's made it to the final eight of my group too. But when it was initially nominated, I immediately thought, "That word seems old to me." Like that was American Dialect Sociey's, one of their words years ago.
Kory:
Mm-hmm
Mignon:
And I have heard other people also say, it seems kind of old, but then when you look at, you know, they again show their data, and lookups were way up for "gaslighting." So how ... what are these perceptions where, I mean obviously it seems old to some people, but brand new to others, and was surging this year when it feels passe to me.
Kory:
Yeah, it was interesting. That was interesting. Not because of the word that ended up being the word of the year, but everyone's response to it, which was I think the first time I've ever seen this response, which was, "Oh, come on, like we did this already."
Mignon:
Kory:
It's funny to me because it's not as though words — words go out of fashion, you know, words get used cyclically, words get used constantly, words sometimes appear and are never used again. That's just the nature of language. So what was interesting to me about "gaslight" is it is a word that does feel old, or at least it's peaked.
Yeah. I would say, yeah.
Feels old to me. Right? I associate "gaslight" much more with 2015, 2016, not with, you know, 2022. I just don't.
Mignon:
Right.
Kory:
But you know, as the folks at Merriam-Webster showed, like there was a lookup spike, and some of that had to do with the actual thing that gaslighting describes. There's been a little bit of controversy about" gaslighting" being used not with its traditional sense, which is that you are intentionally manipulating someone to make them second guess themselves or, but "gaslighting" is sort of moved into like, you did a thing I didn't like, and so I'm gonna say it's gaslighting.
And so there's a little bit of controversy about that. But the big one is that Angela Lansbury died this year, and she was in the movie "Gaslight," which is what gave us the word "gaslighting."
Ah.
So, but it is interesting, I think I saw, I think it was "Rolling Stone" that had a story about it that the headline was something like "Merriam-Webster is Gaslighting us about the Word of the Year
Mignon:
That's a good line.
Kory:
Yeah, it's a pretty good headline. So that was an interesting response. I just, I was fascinated by that.
Mignon:
Yeah. And now that you mentioned it, I do remember seeing in the comments, on my votes, people saying, "Well a lot of people are using this wrong now. And it bugs me."
Kory:
Just another reason why words of the year sometimes end up as words of the year. You know, hey, if it's a perennial lookup because people are arguing about what it's meaning or uses, then it might actually end up in your voting higher in your bracket than you would think. So yeah.
Mignon:
That is fascinating. Well, thank you so much for going through all of this and yeah, it's just so fun to talk to you about words, and now I can't wait to see how everything shakes out in the next few weeks with the words that are still left to come.
Kory:
Mignon:
Well, okay, so let's tell people again, your book is "Word by Word, the
Kory:
Secret Life of Dictionaries."
Mignon:
Available where all fine books are sold.
Kory:
People can find me online. I usually am on Twitter or Mastodon at KoryStamper, though I'm taking a short break because I have another book deadline. B but you can also find me ... I have writing bylines on the New York Times, Washington Post, and you can read some of my old writing koryStamper.com, which is my blog.
Mignon:
Fabulous. Well, thanks again. Thanks so much, Kory.
Kory:
Thanks so much.