Language Log

It's WOTY season, and The Economist's choice for 2025 is slop:

PICKING A WORD of the year is not easy. In the past the American Dialect Society has gone with “tender-age shelters” (2018) and “-ussy” (2022). The Oxford English Dictionary (oed) has caused conniptions by opting for things like “youthquake” (2017) and “goblin mode” (2022). If you cannot remember why those terms were big that year, that is the point: the exercise is not a straightforward one.

Sometimes a single suitable word is not at hand, so a phrase is chosen instead; other times the word simply seems jarring. Middle-aged lexicographers are often tempted to crown a bit of youth slang, but such terms are transient and sound out of date before the press release is published.

The Economist’s choice for 2025 is a single word. It is representative, if not of the whole year, at least of much of the feeling of living in it. It is not a new word, but it is being used in a new way. You may not like it, but you are living with it. And it is probably here to stay.

The Canadian English Dictionary

is a project being developed by the Society for Canadian English, a not-for-profit consortium including Editors Canada, the Canadian Word Centre at UBC and the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University.

And as of yesterday, they announced their first Word of the Year.

In case you've encountered this portmanteau, and wonder about its history, Merriam-Webster has you covered And NPR's Word of the Week featured it last week — Rachel Treisman, "Friendsgiving 101: A history of the made-up holiday and how to celebrate it", 11/19/2025:

Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November. But many Americans don't wait that long to share a fall feast with their loved ones — that is, if they celebrate Friendsgiving.

Friendsgiving is exactly what it sounds like: A gathering close to the date of Thanksgiving, starring many of its starchy staples, usually served potluck-style, with friends instead of relatives.

Think fewer dinner-table political debates, less travel time, turkey optional (more on that later).

As promised, here are a few fun words that I learned by skimming a 17th century slang dictionary.

The first English-language slang dictionary:
A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in Its Several Tribes, of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves, Cheats, &c, With an Addition of some Proverbs, Phrases, Figurative Speeches, &c Useful for all sorts of People (especially Foreigners) to secure their Money and preserve their Lives; besides very Diverting and Entertaining, being wholly New.

Most words have different senses and meanings depending upon the context in which they are used, hence the need for multiple definitions in dictionaries.  Philip Taylor has come across this article about:

8 Words That Are Only Used in One Weirdly Specific Context
Think about it: have you ever heard someone say they had “extenuating errands”?
By Sam Hindman, Mental Floss (11/23/25)

The OED dates meh as an interjection back to 1992, in an internet newsgroup, and as an adjective back to 2007 in The Guardian:

The man could scarcely walk. Two hours later he was cheerfully high-kicking a suicide bomber out the back of a train. Nuts. But somehow it all seemed, to use a bit of internet parlance, a bit ‘meh’.

But this bit of "internet parlance" has started showing up in news headlines, without excuses or scare quotes, and not just in places like college papers.

[Update– For more on the origins and progress of meh, see "Meh-ness to society" (Ben Zimmer, 6/98/2006), "Awwa, meh, feh, heh" (Ben Zimmer, 2/16/2007),  "The 'meh' wars" (Ben Zimmer, 11/21/2008), "The 'meh' wars, part 2" (11/24/2008), "Meh again" (Arnold Zwicky, 12/1/2011), "Words for 'meh'" (Mark Liberman, 12/22/2011), "Three scenes in the life of 'meh'" (Ben Zimmer, 2/26/2012).]

Marie Solis, "When Did Everything Become So ‘Intentional’?", NYT 9/29/2025:

Dating, walking, working out, watching a movie at home, watching a movie in the theater, thrift shopping, grocery shopping, meal prepping, playing trivia, making coffee, drinking coffee, consuming alcohol, making friends, making plans with friends, playing the guitar, journaling, arguing, reading, thinking, scrolling, breathing.

You can just do all of these things. Or you can do them “intentionally,” as a growing chorus of lifestyle gurus, influencers and perhaps slightly overtherapized people you may know personally are preaching lately. […]

A close linguistic relative to mindfulness, living intentionally suggests being present and self-aware. Your words and actions are in near-perfect alignment. Possibly, you’ve meditated recently. True to its literal definition, being “intentional” also implies a series of deliberate choices.

I probably learn at least one or two new foreign words per day, and they always delight me no end.

The first new foreign word I learned today is Turkish kahvalti (lit., "before coffee) which means "breakfast".    

Inherited from Ottoman Turkish قهوه آلتی (ḳahve altı, “food taken before coffee; especially breakfast or lunch”), from قهوه (ḳahve) and آلت (alt), equivalent to kahve (“coffee”) +‎ alt (“under, lower, below”) +‎ -ı (possessive suffix), literally “under coffee”. (Wiktionary)

This tells us how important coffee is in Turkish life.

I've recently noticed two compound neologisms, both involving metaphors about foot-related self injury.

The first one was in an article in Medium on 6/27/2025, "Why Google is Betting 8 Years on a Programming Language That Doesn’t Exist Yet". That article explains that

In 2022, Google introduced Carbon, a potential successor to C++. Unlike Go or Rust, Carbon wasn’t ready for prime time. In fact, it was barely out of the conceptual phase.

And among the reasons given for the effort [emphasis added]:

C++ has steep learning curves and footguns.

The second foot-related compound was in a 7/24/2025 TPM article, "Why is Jeff Bezos rakestomping the Post?".

In a comment on "Alignment", Sniffnoy wrote:

At least as far as I'm aware, the application of "alignment" to AI comes from Eliezer Yudkowsky or at least someone in his circles. He used to speak of "friendly AI" and "unfriendly AI". However, the meaning of these terms was fairly different from the plain meaning, which confused people. So at some point he switched to talking about "aligned" or "unaligned" AI.

This is certainly true — see e.g. Yudkowsky's 2016 essay "The AI alignment problem: why it is hard, and where to start".

However, an (almost?) exactly parallel usage was established in the sociological literature, more than half a century earlier, as discussed in Randall Stokes and John Hewitt, "Aligning actions" (1976):

In today's email there was a message from AAAI 2026 that included a "Call for the Special Track on AI Alignment""

AAAI-26 is pleased to announce a special track focused on AI Alignment. This track recognizes that as we begin to build more and more capable AI systems, it becomes crucial to ensure that the goals and actions of such systems are aligned with human values. To accomplish this, we need to understand the risks of these systems and research methods to mitigate these risks. The track covers many different aspects of AI Alignment, including but not limited to the following topics: