This Week's Inquirer: 2022’s ‘Word of the Year’ proves we should stop this inane pseudo-tradition

This week’s reveal of "goblin mode" as Oxford’s Word of the Year laid bare everything that’s wrong with this clickbaity nonsense.

We should probably be grateful. If not for the Oxford English Dictionary’s inane pandering, we might not have realized what’s really needed to salvage our mother tongue:

It’s time to kill the “Word of the Year.”

This week’s reveal of goblin mode as Oxford’s Word of the Year laid bare everything that’s wrong with this clickbaity pseudo-tradition. The dictionary’s editors typically debate among themselves about which word perfectly captures the linguistic zeitgeist, but for 2022 they narrowed it down to three “words,” which they then tossed to a goofy online poll.

I generously use quotation marks around “words,” given that none of the three options should even qualify.

Read the full column at Inquirer.com.