It seems like every 12 months now – usually during the first few weeks of January – we’re treated to a literary phenomenon known as The Word of the Year. You know what I’m talking about. Brand-name dictionaries pick a newly popularized word they think got over-used the previous year (often it’s newly minted, too) and add it to the latest edition of their official glossaries.
In 2025, Merriam-Webster chose ‘slop,’ which the company says refers to “digital content of low quality produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
Not to be out-slopped, the prestigious Oxford University Press got hooked on ‘rage-bait,’ a compound noun rewarded with immediate inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is now forever defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage,” in the hope, of course, that you’ll click on it and send a few ad cents to whoever’s managing the website. A good example might be, “Monetize THIS, you #!>!*\#?/!
If that doesn’t get your gorge rising, I don’t know what will.
Lots of folks have a few nasty words of their own for The Word of the Year, but not me. Language, as they say, is a living thing – even if it sometimes smells like it’s been rotting in the basement for a while – and I’m all for jolting it occasionally to bring it back to life. I do have a pejorative to pick, though, with the process for deciding just who gets to choose the vaunted verb. Or noun. Or adjective. Or adverb. Jesus. Somebody stop me before all those things come together into a full sentence!
In fact, I’m thinking maybe I might be the right person for the job. And to demonstrate my seriously deficient bona fides ( i.e., Oxford and Merriam-Webster shouldn’t let me anywhere near this), I have compiled an extraordinarily insightful collection of gratuitously invented words-of-the-year that say more than you probably want to hear about …
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1955 Antennanitis A fictitious medical condition afflicting second-grade boys thought to be caused by constantly adjusting TV rabbit ears to get a better picture of Annette on the Mickey Mouse Club.
1962 Fwip The sound Spiderman’s web makes when it shoots across the room. Also, what someone with a speech impediment does to a pancake.
1974 Dicklip A reference to Richard Nixon’s flagrant untruths regarding the Watergate break-in, as in “I been dicklipped (lied to),” or “Don’t dicklip me.” For those of you who thought I might be going another way with this, you ought to be ashamed.
1991 Badfry Purportedly linked to a nationwide recall of fast-food French fries, the verb is meant to suggest a disastrously undesirable outcome, as in, “You might want to find another stall. I been badfried.”
2006 Laundrofrat A group of college men who band together to save money by doing all their wash at the same time in the same coin-operated machine. The term went viral when a single washing machine packed with 37 separate loads exploded in the college town of Dumbalz, Ohio, and left underwear hanging from telephone lines in a half-mile blast radius.
2013 Snowfaked A word mashup coined when uncountable households along the Eastern Seaboard spent three days and hundreds of millions of dollars in February preparing for a disastrous Nor’easter, only to watch it turn into a Nor’wester.
2020 Snowf_cked A word mashup coined when uncountable households along the Eastern Seaboard spent three days in February laughing at what they thought was a winter Nor’wester, only to watch it turn into a Nor’easter.
Don’t worry. That’s the last one.
You have my word.
... While it All Falls Apart 
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