Can't trust the experts with a WOTY

It’s the moment all the world has been waiting for, the announcement that defines civilization for the next century, the development of such import that nobody has even looked at their phones for the past two weeks, for fear of missing this incredible event.

Yes, it’s time for the 2023 Dad Writes Word of the Year, the single combination of letters and, every so often, an apostrophe, that reflects the trends, the vibe, the absolute geist of the zeit. Years from now, you'll recount to your grandchildren exactly where you were when you first heard the news.

There was a time we left the annual WOTY choices to the self-proclaimed "experts" at the so-called "dictionary publishers," the elitists who think they know more words than the rest of us simply because they know more words than the rest of us. Those days are gone, though, as even the world’s biggest idiots are now empowered to make any choices we want and issue any judgments we want and declare any truths we want inside our bubbles.

God, I love the smell of My Truth in the morning.

Frankly, we’d be happy to leave the choices to the nattering nabobs among the “educated class,” but they have shown an inability to perform that’s even sadder than that guy in the ED commercials.

The Cambridge Dictionary anointed ‘hallucinate’ as its winner this year, for reasons nobody can comprehend, while Merriam-Webster chose  ‘authentic,’ which has been used much less frequently than ‘fake’ for many years and shows no signs of making a comeback. Oxford English Dictionary came up with ‘play harder,’ which is both two words and also ridiculous.

Collins Dictionary landed on 'AI,' which is actually an abbreviation, not a word, although they did allow the use of 'artificial intelligence,' which is, again, two words. If we were going to consider abbreviations, AF would be more deserving than AI, but they’re much too prissy at Deep Words to deal with real, tough, manly, hard-core, tough-guy language.

We struggled to sift through literally several options for this year and we’re exhausted from the challenge. So many words have dominated the conversation, including fascism, communism, wokeism, socialism and Nazism. We considered all of them, but we disqualified the whole group because the people using the words have no idea how those words are actually defined.

A good WOTY must be more than popular. People must know what they’re talking about when they say it. We had to reject genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and occupation, as well, because people who use the words cannot agree with each other about what they mean.

We dallied with hip new words like bougie/boujee, rizz and sus, partly to honor the incredible productivity of Gen(whatever-is-hip-now) linguists and partly to confuse the rest of our generation. We had to drop the idea, though, because the hippest hipsters would ban those words immediately if old people started using them. Boom!! Amiright? LOL.

Fortunately, we found the perfect word for 2023, as all our loyal fans knew we would. It’s not only one of the most heavily used words in America, but it’s one that everyone understands to mean the same thing. It’s the perfect word to represent our social and political discourse and, most important, our blood-lust for revenge.

That’s why the Dad Writes Word of the Year 2023 is: WEAPONIZE.

Whether it’s the criminal justice system, social media, libraries, Congressional committees or school board meetings, somebody somewhere is weaponizing it. Nobody objects to anything anymore. Nobody argues about anything. Nobody even tilts the balance in their team’s favor. They weaponize it. And while we recognize that some exercises truly convert basic systems into weapons, our WOTY is already so overused that it’s starting to resemble ‘literally,’ a word that now means exactly what it doesn't mean.

The perfect choice, right? We agree.

Now, let’s all observe a moment of silence in sympathy with the elitist dictionarians who are considering their 2023 WOTYs and muttering, “Weaponize. Why didn’t we think of that? SMH!!”

Clearly, in 2024, they need to play harder.

Also in 2024, they need to click here to subscribe to Dad Writes and learn a few things about wordification.


 

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