Macquarie’s word of the year is the perfect emblem for a grim era

By now, you’ll know Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. In case you don’t, let me give you a hint. We live in a world of pop-up ads, booking fees, chatbot helplines, unsubscribe labyrinths, sponsored search hits, dark webs and data trading. Care to guess?

The honeymoon thrill of Facebook (now Meta) has gone. Ditto the retro-chic of Instagram, the purer TikTok scrolling, the zest of Twitter (now X). Come 2024, our online fun has turned fungible. Corruptible. Profitable.

Over two hours, the panel – myself included – whittled a 65-word longlist down to one worthy winner.Credit: Sydney Morning Herald

To quote Canadian writer Cory Doctorow: “We’re all living through a great enshittening in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.”

How many hints do you need? This year, an emblem of our era, Macquarie’s word of 2024 is Doctorow’s 2022 coinage: enshittification.

Everywhere you look, from cookie trails to platform fails, enshittification is real. We now upgrade our streaming status to block ads we didn’t cop a year ago. Indeed, in 2023, enshittification won the American Dialect Society’s word of the year. This devolution darling is only getting handier.

No shock then, Macquarie’s silver went to RTD, namely the Right To Disconnect. As offices lose their borders, we need to protect our QWT, or quality wine-time. Out of hours now means out of contact, legally. A chance to replenish the social battery (another shortlist entry), or possibly go rawdogging – the bronze medallist.

Despite the back-row sniggers, rawdogging here does not allude to condom-free sex, but rather the decision to ditch the usual dependencies, be they meds or devices. The lifestyle equivalent of going commando, shaking phone or caffeine in the name of unfiltered experience.

Sadly, not a nirvana the selection panel reached to sift this year’s batch. Google Meet in fact (plus strong coffee) allowed for ABC’s word whiz Tiger Webb, dictionary detective James Lambert and me to join Macquarie’s editors Alison Moore and Victoria Morgan. Over two hours we whittled the 65-word longlist (across 13 categories) into a workable 15, starting at fairy porn (Arts) and ending on Q-day (Tech).

Q-day, you say? This is the theoretical moment when quantum computers augment to a point of decrypting every passcode out there – a latter-day Y2K if you will. Other faves included overtourism, rent-bidding and the meme-gobbling stupor of brain rot. Handing the choice to you, the public vote awarded bronze to social battery, furlongs behind the front runners of brain rot (silver) and enshittification (gold). A rare instance of the panel and wider village singing in harmony.

As always, plenty of good stuff hit the floor, from destination thriller to kill notice, from rage bait to airpocalypse. Though I’m happy to report de-influencing and deleb (a dead celeb, hologrammed into service) missed the cut.

Yet for every shortlisted charmer like spoon bowl (a wooden-spoon showdown) or chip-on-a-stick (also known as a tornado potato), there’s the opacity of skibidi, a joyous nonsense for cool, best described as covfefe of the skate park. Or the Frankenstein horror of incidentaloma, being that lump you accidentally discover while visiting the GP for a separate matter.

Speaking of compounds, the Australian National Dictionary picked Colesworth (our market’s super-duopoly), compared to the Collins’ crowning of brat, now a lifestyle mindset, and Cambridge’s pick of manifest (the verb). And should all these choices only appal, then please treat the news as further enshittification of English.

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