Time to see how old you really are. Merriam-Webster, the folks who make dictionaries and catalog words, have made some 370 words official this month. Your reaction to the list will tell you more or less what your mental age is. Are you Gen Z-level or readying yourself for a ‘Get off my lawn’ future?
Our headline has already functioned as a sort of barometer. If ‘sponcon, ‘yeet’, ‘sus’, or ‘metaverse’ are making your eyes twitch, you really don’t want to see the rest of the list. If you’re greeting the news with joy, you’re… actually, you’re probably a Scrabble champion.
I give you my words
Merriam-Webster’s triggering batch of new nouns, adjectives, and other parts of speech has been divided up into sections. Tech, obviously, has one of its own. ‘Dumbphone’ (opposite of smartphone), ‘video doorbell’, ‘microgrid’, ‘use case’, ‘supply grid’, and ‘greenwash’ are all official. We could have thought some of ’em already were, but there you go.
In addition to metaverse and sponcon, terms specific to virtual worlds, you can also officially use ‘laggy’ and ‘virtue signalling’ in conversation. They’re real now too. ‘Space force’ and ‘terraform’, a word from waaay back, are also part of the dictionary now. So are ‘yeet’, ‘sus’, ‘janky’, ‘lewk’, ‘pwn’, and a batch of about 350 others.
The new crop of ‘official’ words isn’t exactly unprecedented. The word of the year, according to Collins, was NFT. This just shows that even the overly literate aren’t always the most tasteful of folks.
