WOTY we thinking?

There is nothing quite so draining as the high-stakes battle to be crowned Dad Writes’s Word of the Year. Day after day, people speak with us, write to us, text us and curse us with words, and there’s no escape. Words are everywhere…online and on the street and even to your mother.

As always, we rose to the occasion, even as  the so-called experts in lexicology dropped the ball yet again this year.

Oxford Dictionaries came up with GOBLIN MODE, but only after the editors decided to demonstrate the word by punting to their readers to make the choice. And choose they did, giving this weirdly vague term 93% of their vote in a contest with METAVERSE, where nobody wants to live, and #ISTANDWITH, which isn't even a word. Still, GOBLIN MODE is more creative than VAX, which was the half-word the editors picked last year.

They must be really tired in the UK, because the editors at Cambridge Dictionary also took the easy path to their WOTY. Those blokes decided their word would be HOMER, and not because of baseball or Simpsons reruns. Nope, they were all agog after almost 65,000 Wordle players looked it up on May 5, yet another date that will live in infamy.

Dictionary.com was even worse, choosing WOMAN as the word we’re all talking about in 2022. They say it’s relevant because so many political fights have erupted over gender issues and lots of people are checking out the definition of a woman. Since they were going that route, they probably should have picked GENDER as their WOTY, but these are the same people (bots?) who came up with ALLYSHIP in 2021.

Once again, the so-called experts have let us down, which led us to consider EXPERTS as our WOTY. Like LITERALLY, which has come to mean both “literally” and “not literally,” EXPERTS means both its original definition and its opposite. Depending on which tribe someone is in, an EXPERT might be “someone who has great knowledge about a specific subject” or “a worthless, lying scumbag who’s trying to force his *)(Y&@QW_$&@Q agenda on me.”

We toyed with CRYPTO, a word that we probably won’t be using at all two years from now, along with  TWITTER, which also should be obsolete pretty soon. We even considered WHITE LOTUS, YELLOWSTONE and a Ted-Lasso-inspired BELIEVE.

Then, we realized that the perfect choice for this year is actually a word about words, a word whose definition is debated daily on social media, a word whose power to incite emotion is unequaled in our Zeitgeist. And that word is: PRONOUN.

Give it up for our 2022 Word of the Year, a word we forgot about after sixth grade English classes, but which now epitomizes our polarized climate. PRONOUN is the latest example of Liberal wordsmithing gone horribly wrong, a word that has been conscripted into service as a cudgel for virtue signaling and online outrage.

PRONOUN is a dare, a taunt, a manufactured battlefield that gives oxygen and adrenaline to activists and trolls. In a world where it’s all about me, what could be better than a personalized selection of third-person identities? It’s the perfect WOTY for 2022, a year in which normalcy reared its ugly head at the voting booth and it looked like we might find just a bit less to fight about at Christmas dinner. Thanks to PRONOUN, we have something really, really important to argue about with everyone we know.

Ah, PRONOUN, your time has come: one more reason to fight, one more opportunity to choose sides, yet another line in the sand. After centuries in the shadows, 2022 is, finally, your time to shine.

We have other words that we’ll be using in future posts, so you’ll definitely want to click here to subscribe for all our random thoughts.
 
 
 
 
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