Words of the Year 

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'Words, words, words.' So replied Hamlet when his girlfriend's conniving father asked what he was reading. Some people would argue he was dissembling. But because I pay attention to words, I take his opaque answer more as a rallying cry for close readers. In other words—words matter.

The English lexicon comprises about 170,000 words. Neologisms—newly minted words—are added at the rate of 900 a year. Some of them gain traction; many don't.

Thousands of words, perhaps as many as 45,000, are now missing in action. The list includes "lunting," which means to take a walk and smoke a pipe. In my salad days, in an age when smoking Marlboros was cool, I considered buying Gauloises, the cheap French cigarettes popularized by hip beatnik writers. I couldn't find them in Salt Lake City, so I bought a meerschaum pipe instead and lunted occasionally. I didn't know I was lunting at the time, and I soon gave it up to pursue hipster status in a rumpled tweed sport coat, corduroy pants and desert boots.

These days, Hamlet-inspired word mavens like me look forward to December each year. Not long after City Weekly publishes its annual Best of Utah edition, the American Dialect Society announces the word of the year—known by the acronym WOTY in bookish precincts. Four dictionary companies do the same.

The selections are based on usage and the number of lookups on company websites. Some words are recent coinages. Some, which have been long neglected, are thrust into the limelight by such events as the attack on the government by Trumpist thugs. Hence, the choice of "insurrection" as the 2021 WOTY.

A press release provided the rationale: "At the time, words like'coup,''sedition,' and'riot'were used to describe the disturbing events at the Capitol, but'insurrection'—a term for a violent attempt to take control of the government—is the one that many felt best encapsulates the threat to democracy experienced that day."

Another of the year's salient events was the Omicron surge. No surprise that "vax"was the Oxford Dictionary's WOTY. The dictionary company reported that usage increased 70-fold as compared to 2020. The word has also spawned as many variants as COVID-19 itself. There are "vax cards" for the "fully vaxed" and "Fauci ouchies" administered at drive-thru "vax sites." "Double vaxxed" made the Collins Dictionary's list of WOTY runners-up.

"Vaccine" was Merriam-Webster's WOTY. The noun, whose lexical roots reach back to the mid-1800s, was also short-listed by Dictionary.com. According to Merriam-Webster, the word "really represents two different stories. One is the science story, which is the remarkable speed with which the vaccines were developed. But there's also the debates regarding policy, politics and political affiliation."

At Dictionary.com, "allyship"got the nod for WOTY 2021. Engaging in allyship is defined as supporting a marginalized group of which you are not a member. The noun has social justice overtones. The response of some men to the #MeToo movement and the white supporters of Black Lives Matter are two examples, but it is also true that Utah's long-suffering Democrats could use some allyship from their Republican overlords.

Finally, from Collins Dictionary, comes "non-fungible token" (NFT) as its surprise WOTY. NFT is as arcane as the blockchain technology that enables it. An NFT establishes ownership of digital artwork, or, in Melania Trump's case, a share of the First Lady memorabilia she is now peddling. I'm at a loss to explain the how or the why of NFTs. They remind me of the credit default swaps—understood by neither buyer nor seller—that played a role in the financial crisis of 2008.

Those are the five 2021 winners, then—insurrection, vax, vaccine, allyship and NFT. Taken in the aggregate, these words provide a cultural marker, a snapshot of that which is uppermost on the public's mind. In the shadows beyond the limelight, however, the short-listed words bide their time like understudies waiting for a summons. The 2021 runners-up included work-at-home "Zoomers," opting for elastic at the waist instead of "hard pants," plus "Critical Race Theory," "woke," "cisgender," "doomscrolling" and "infrastructure."

There is also a handful of words that surface in punditry. The current crop includes "top-of-mind," "double-down," "gaslight" and "one-off." Verbing nouns is one source of these fad words. As in: "Fearing being primaried in the primary, Republican officeholders kowtow to Trump." And as with any fad, most will soon fall by the wayside as did the once-popular "hair on fire" and "throw under the bus" (as Trump did to Jeff Sessions, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Mike Pence and other loyalists).

It is also possible Hamlet's words were intended to obfuscate. That's what Utah congressmen Chris Stewart and Burgess Owens have done at every turn, especially in defense of their deplorable "no" votes on the 2020 election results. Obfuscation was also deployed to explain how Never-Trumper Sen. Mike Lee drank the MAGA Kool-Aid. Utah's pols evidently believe that if you use the same words over and over, they take on the golden veneer of truth—but it's fool's gold.

I suppose it is also possible that Hamlet's "words, words, words" are the equivalent of "blah, blah, blah." Owens disparages left-leaning guys like me as "whiners, weenies and wimps." To which I say: Blah, blah, blah. A Republican congressman from Georgia insists the Jan. 6 insurrection was "a normal tourist visit." I say: Blah, blah, blah. When Utah's likeable governor lapses into his "golly-gosh, pretty-please" mode, I say: Blah, blah, blah. When a child is killed by an AR-15 and the grieving parents get politicians' "thoughts and prayers," I say: Blah, blah, blah.

The blather and obfuscation are exhausting. Like Hamlet, we have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune for too long. We need fewer words and more action.

Private Eye is off this week. Send comments to editor@cityweekly.net.