What Our New Words Say About Our Anxiety in Today's World

What do “rage bait,” “parasocial,” and “slop” all have in common?

They are all words that speak to ways the internet and AI have infiltrated our lives—and their use has spiked dramatically over the last year. But more importantly, these words reveal a deeper concern about the potential for emotional exploitation in the digital age, the darker side of our embrace of technology.

The words of a year

At the dawn of the new year, dictionaries, publishers, and learned societies look back at that year’s “it” words, meaning those which exploded in posts and news feeds, drove search engine and dictionary look-ups, and newly rolled off the lips of those in tech, business, media, and politics.

What they found overwhelmingly were words describing a new world dominated by AI and digitally mediated relationships.

A life online

Many of the new words most discussed this year reflected the dramatic change that the internet has introduced in how we live and work.

Oxford University Press selected “rage bait” as their word of the year, a word which describes online content specifically created to provoke anger for the sole purpose of driving up site traffic and engagement. They cited a massive rise in the usage of the word across media and public sentiment as factors underpinning this choice.

Also speaking to unhealthy emotional investment, Cambridge Dictionary picked “parasocial,” a word describing a fantasized relationship with someone—often a celebrity or influencer—who doesn’t know you exist. Though this word has been around in academic circles since the 1950s, its transfer over into mainstream conversation has been driven in large part by the faux intimacy that social media interactions with such figures helps create.

The proliferation of generative AI informed several other word selections. For instance, the American Dialect Society, Merriam-Webster, and the Australian Macquarie Dictionary all selected “slop” or “AI slop” as their words of the year based on the ever-increasing prevalence of misleading or low-quality AI-generated content flooding digital feeds.

A more positive view

Not all tech-informed word selections focused on the negative: Collins English Dictionary chose “vibe-coding,” or creating code without any coding ability by simply telling generative AI what you want it to do, as its word of the year. This selection highlights the fact that AI has changed not just what we see online, but also the types of content and work product that non-specialists can now create.

Though not selected as a winner, the word “agentic” also created a lot of buzz this year, pointing toward the next phase of AI general intelligence, where AI is able to act with increasing autonomy, or agency, and makes informed decisions without human guidance.

In short, a tug-of-war between the advances technology might afford and what it might cost in return was on full view in the words that exploded in popularity this year.

A life in view

Discussions about which new or increasingly popular words best summed up the cultural zeitgeist of the year centered not only around those describing how technology has changed how we engage online, but also on how constantly posting about our lives and activities has complicated notions of authenticity in self-presentation.

The idea that modern culture has made it so that people feel the need to curate their lives for the view of others comes through in the rising popularity of words like “aura-farming” and “performative.” “Aura-farming” refers to trying hard to exude charisma or confidence, without looking like you are trying at all.

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The adjective “performative” has been put to work in new ways to call out inauthentic behavior, most prominently in the phrase “performative male,” describing a man who tries to impress a woman by insincerely presenting himself as sensitive or pro-feminist. This idea that people are often simply dressing a part for public show has also driven its use in phrases like “performative activist” and “performative politics.”

Getting away from it all

The third major theme in the round-up of words newly prominent or popular this year was that of getting away from constant (often online) distraction to focus on what’s really important.

Getting outside and "touching grass"

Source: Daniel Reche/Pixabay

For instance, the use of the phrase “touching grass” has grown exponentially since first appearing in 2016, typically used in a derogatory way to tell someone that they need to “get a reality check” or get offline and experience the outside world.

As well, the term “holding space,” meaning being meaningfully present for and validating of someone else’s experience, has also seen an uptick in use, moving out of primarily psychological discourse to more mainstream use.

This is in sharp contrast to “glazing,” describing an almost embarrassing over-the-top level of complimenting, a slang term often used on TikTok to call out comments construed as insincere flattery or sucking up.

The world in a word

From words that sum up the low-quality content that clogs our feeds to those that sum up how we now curate our lives and behaviors for others to view, the words selected this year as “Words of the Year” captured the deep impact the digital age has had on how we understand the world and ourselves.

Maybe that’s why we needed the escapism of the silly nonsensical fun summed up in Dictionary.com’s choice of “6/7” as word of the year, a word which means, well, absolutely nothing.