Words of the year: Fritinancy edition

Fritinancy: ” Yes, words, plural. Because when you keep track of interesting new and newly prominent words all year long, as I do, you have a tough time settling on just one word of the year (WOTY). Other deciding bodies are more, well, decisive. Cambridge Dictionaries chose manifest. Collins Dictionary selected brat. (See my post on brat from June.) The Economist chose kakistocracy (one of my own words of the week in November). Merriam-Webster straddled the divide with polarization. Oxford University Press, which invited the public to vote on a shortlist, picked brain rot, about which I’ll have more to say further down. Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary chose enshittification; if that sounds familiar, it’s because it was the American Dialect Society’s WOTY for 2023  Still to come: the ADS 2024 selection, which will be voted on at the society’s annual conference, in Philadelphia, on January 5. You can send the ADS your own selection(s) using this form. Also: Check out Jim Asher’s December WOTY countdown…And that’s only the English-language WOTY winners..The German Association for German Language — it’s in Germany, in case you had any doubt — selected ampel-aus, which translates to “traffic light off” and refers to the demise of Germany’s SPD-Greens-FDP “traffic light coalition” (Ampelkoalition), whose respective colors are red, yellow, and green…Meanwhile, here are the words I found most interesting, distinctive, novel, or relevant in the last twelve months. As in past years, I’ve followed American Dialect Society guidelines: “Word is broadly defined to include multiword phrases, compounds, idiomatic expressions, and even emoji that behave like single lexical items.”…