ADS WotY 2024
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The American Dialect Society's Word of the Year vote was last night, and the overall WotY winner was rawdog. You can read the whole list and voting tallies in the ADS press release.
The WotY phenomenon has (long since) gone global, as the current set of bsky #woty2024 posts attests — though most of them are of course about last night's ADS vote, with references to many other English-language WotY results from around the world over the past couple of months (and years), you can also find out about WotY outcomes in Chinese, Turkish, Icelandic, German, Japanese, Dutch, and so on.
There was evidence at last night's WotY vote to support the following observation, at least if we substitute "some" for "most":
fun fact
most @americandialect.org Words of the Year are actually motivated by linguists amused by @benzimmer.bsky.social having to say the words in public
#woty2024— Because Language (@becauselangpod.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 8:32 PM
One interesting outcome was Luigi as Political Word of the Year. These were the votes:
And the runoff:
Haamu said,
January 11, 2025 @ 2:25 pm
The Political WotY results really took me aback. I'm fully aware of the Luigi phenomenon but totally missed its linguistic productivity — as has, apparently, Urban Dictionary — perhaps because of the particular mix of media (social and otherwise) I tend to rely on. After a few minutes of googling, I find it's easy to infer meanings for the cited coinages Luigi-pilled, luigification, get luigi'ed, etc., but tough to confirm the inferences.
A few things may be going on here (in decreasing order of likelihood) to explain the vote in this category:
(1) Most obviously, recency: Mangione's crime was committed on Dec 4 and his name was not widely known until his arrest on Dec 9.
(2) Social media prominence: As suggested above, perhaps ADS voters tend to hang out where I don't, on X or other platforms where the Mangione memetic wildfire apparently burned hottest.
(3) Video game resonance: Get luigi'ed and the meme Luigi intensifies have been known for years in the context of the Nintendo character Luigi.
(4) Politics and voting procedure: I couldn't easily find the precise voting rules, but one assumes it's first-past-the-post plus runoff. Under those conditions, voters of my political persuasion would have split their votes across three or four of the entries that voters of the opposite persuasion would have dismissed. Meanwhile, Luigi cuts across traditional political categories in an interesting way and might pick up voters of all stripes. One wonders if ranked-choice voting would have produced a different result.
I'll posit that 2 or 3 years from now, the choice of Luigi over sanewashing or broligarchy will seem quaint at best.
David Marjanović said,
January 12, 2025 @ 9:58 am
It just dawned on me that the eating (il mangione) of the rich has begun… unless I'm making up my Italian on the fly, of course.