It is one of the pleasures of language that each word carries its little freight of history. You may not like the times — I’m sceptical of many of the internet’s cultural effects — but history leaves its mark on language. We cannot and should not wish it otherwise. It would be tragic if our own time did not leave a layer of sediment in the ancient landscape of English. And who knows, perhaps being “woke” will last beyond Christmas and New Year.
Collins Dictionary informs us that 2025’s “word of the year” is “vibe coding”, the amateur practice of using AI to write computer code. Almost every dictionary now offers a word of the year. The idea is to seek publicity, and presumably “connect” with younger demographics who pay little attention to lexicography.
In recent years the Oxford English Dictionary has descended from its ivory tower to recommend the neologisms “brain rot”, “rizz” and “goblin mode”. I suppose these owlish efforts at hip are preferable to the pious Merriam Webster which has recently elevated “democracy”, “integrity” and “feminism”. Im not going to infill your obvious lack of ‘cooelle’ dear reader you just go right ahead and “google” each phrase.
Well, it is easy (and enjoyable) to scoff. But the proliferation of words of the year also reflects a real phenomenon: we are living through a period of linguistic innovation that is probably unprecedented in the history of English. In a culture widely regarded as stuck, with its endlessly self-reproducing superhero franchises and stale literary scene, our language is a heartening source of creativity.
The main motor of change is, of course, the internet. Language production has been radically democratised. Words no longer have to get into newspapers or onto television to gain wide currency. They can bubble up anywhere and spread with alacrity online, jumping across cultures and continents.
Clearly, not all new words are beautiful. Twenty-first century neologisms such as “selfie”, “paywall”, “glamping”, “click-and-collect” and “Brexit” hardly constitute adornments of the language. But the general effect is positive. Human communication is a satisfyingly Darwinian process. Dross is discarded. Good words can now be drawn from a wider gene pool. We would not wish to be without many well-established internet-derived words.
“Trolling”, for example, with its pleasing hint of fairytale unpleasantness, describes a phenomenon that hadn’t been nailed by a single word before. “Meme”, which we owe originally to Richard Dawkins, has evolved to provide us with an indispensable means of describing the way ideas travel online and naturally, the internet has produced a vivid vocabulary of invective: “gammon”, “terf”, “melt”, “karen”, “libtard”, “snowflake”, “SJW”.
I am probably alone in my love of the word “woke”, which sounds both furious and funny, and describes a real and irritating phenomenon more acutely than the bland “progressive”. Plaintive reminders that the term “is inextricably linked with the rise of black consciousness” and should be used positively to describe a state of being “perpetually attuned to discrimination” are doomed.
Some will regard all this as the hopeless debasement of an ancient tongue. But to deplore neologisms is futile. Three centuries ago Jonathan Swift scathingly attacked such “modern terms of art” as “sham, banter, mob, bubble, bully, cutting, shuffling, and palming” and wondered whether a means could be found of “fixing our language for ever”. Fortunately, we do not still speak the English of the early 18th century. The desire to arrest language is not conservative but hopelessly utopian.
Nouns have become verbs and words have attracted stray letters since our most distant linguistic ancestors roamed the Indo-European steppe. Older readers will remember a time when the blameless verb “to contact” provoked pedantic fury. An orange was once a “norange”, “brave” meant “showy” and “artificial” was a term of high praise. The great river of language flows on.
And so I wince at “to gift” but accept it is, alas, a word that has found a niche. Apparently, the world needs it. The same is true of the widespread modern abuse of the reflexive pronoun (as in, “please speak to myself or another member of the HR team”) which to me connotes vacuous corporate self-importance. But it has found a role in a language that lacks the useful distinction between the formal and informal modes of address catered to in French by “tu” and “vous”. I suppose it may one day seem elegant (I hope I am dead by then).
Linguistic innovation is a cheerfully democratic process, indifferent to the wailings of pedants — and also to the efforts of authoritarian-minded academics who imagine they can use language to steer human society in a more enlightened direction. Fashionable locutions such as “Latinx”, “people of the global majority” and the politically correct pronouns “zir/zirself” are falling by the wayside.
But words do trickle down from above when they are genuinely needed. An age of innovation has been enriched by words from technology and science. The linguist Steve Pinker has suggested that neologisms may have helped contribute to the so-called Flynn effect, the steady growth of average IQ in the 20th century. As scientific ideas filtered out of academia and into general awareness, shaping a more logical, rational world view among ordinary people, the process was “expedited” by new words which provided “shorthand terms for abstract concepts”. Among them, Pinker suggests: “correlation, empirical, false positive, percentage, placebo, post hoc, proportional, statistical, tradeoff and variability”. The contribution of the modern humanities — “liminal space”, “problematic”, “intersectionality” — has been less happy.
Now that Christmas is next week and New Year’s is only a few short days away, many people are officially hurtling into the good and bad of the holiday season. For many, this is a time filled with happiness and cheer. After all, it’s supposed to be the “most wonderful time of the year.” But some who proudly consider themselves “woke” might be wrestling with how to embrace the holiday season while not embracing capitalism. Maybe, the solution is to boycott the holidays and sit out dinner at grandma’s house. But perhaps there’s a way to strike a balance. Maybe, an “all or nothing” approach does not have to be taken, but to instead create a plan that will embrace the holiday season in a meaningful and conscious way with friends and family.
So go ahead my little woketts … enjoy the reason for the season!
Adapted from James Marriott, Monday November 10 2025, 9.00pm GMT, The Times