Word of the Week: ‘Goblin mode’
Nicholas Clairmont
It’s getting to be that time of year when we try to think back about what this orbit of the sun all meant. That means looking back for some. And for dictionaries, it means the word of the year. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year runner-up a decade ago was a former “Word of the Week”: malarkey. In 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden used the charmingly old-timey term, later to be part of his primary campaign sloganeering, in his debate with Paul Ryan. 2022’s word of the year from Merriam-Webster (and another previous “Word of the Week”) is a synonym to malarkey (or at least a related concept): gaslighting. According to the American dictionary publisher, “in this age of misinformation — of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes — gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time. A driver of disorientation and mistrust, gaslighting is ‘the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.’”
As I wrote in the “Word of the Week” column about “gaslight” and its growing misuse, “The word ‘gaslight’ gets thrown around so loosely today it’s hard to even remember its original meaning. In the 1944 movie Gaslight, an adaptation of a slightly older stage play also known as Angel Street, Ingrid Bergman’s character is lied to repeatedly, obviously, and systematically. She’s told the titular lights in the house are not dimming as she claims, when they clearly are. When she says she remembers reading a letter, she’s told she actually held nothing at all in her hands. She’s told she has inherited some form of mental disease. All of which is to make her ask: Am I going insane?”
The dictionary now records this development. “When gaslighting was first used in the mid 20th century it referred to a kind of deception like that in the movie. […] But in recent years, we have seen the meaning of gaslighting refer also to something simpler and broader: ‘the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.’” Per Merriam-Webster, “2022 saw a 1740% increase in lookups for gaslighting, with high interest throughout the year.” (Or did it? Maybe you just think it did.)
Anyway, Oxford Dictionaries committed a classic internet mistake and asked the broader public to vote in an online competition for the winner of its word of the year. It is from this method that we got the famous “RSS Boaty McBoatface,” which was the runaway favorite naming proposal for a polar research vessel the British government decided would be christened by internet poll under the hashtag #NameOurShip. This was then sheepishly undone by the powers that be, who called the main vessel the RSS Sir David Attenborough instead. Eventually, after outcry from the internet at its creative naming efforts being thwarted, one of the explorer submarines on the ship was called Boaty McBoatface. (For a look at the history of this Comic McNameconstruction, check out then-Slate writer Katy Waldman’s 2016 piece, “From Cool McCool to Boaty McBoatface: An Investigationy McInvestigation.”)
Oxford tends to be a little looser with what counts as a word, so it really has something like a “term of the year” or a “compound phrase of the year.” It hasn’t had a good word of the year since “omnishambles” in 2012. Intervening years have seen stuff such as “youthquake,” “vape,” and “climate emergency.”
Now edited by public referendum, Oxford’s 2022 “word” of the year is “goblin mode.” It is, per the dictionary organization, “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” I would have bet $10,000 that with the public open to online voting on the word of the year, it would have been Wordy McWordface. That’s democracy for you.