My Word of the Year 2022: a year late?

At this time of year, dictionary publishers announce their Word of the Year (WOTY). It’s a move aimed largely at attracting publicity and it generally provokes various reactions in sections of the media. Different dictionaries use different criteria when choosing their WOTY, which are often missed or misunderstood by commentators, but maybe that’s part of the fun. This year’s crop so far include:

Collins have gone with a zeitgeisty buzzword: permacrisis

Cambridge went with one of their most looked-up words and a controversial Wordle US English solution: homer

Oxford have put their short-list out to a public vote: metaverse, #IStandWith, goblin mode (you have until 2 Dec to vote)

It got me mulling over what my own personal WOTY might be. I came up with quite a few key phrases that seem to have been around recently, including cost of living crisis and loss and damage (from the recent COP summit), but none of them seemed very snappy. Then as I thought back across my year, I realized that 2022 has largely been the year in which I felt I was getting back to something closer to normal post pandemic. (If we take pandemic to refer to the outbreak and spread of the disease rather than its continuing presence – which I’m all too aware of given I had my first bout of covid this summer.)

In-person

A key part of that sense of normality has been more freedom to meet up with people in person rather than online. Especially in a work context, I went to my first in-person conference for a couple of years with IATEFL in Belfast back in May and in-person meetings have started to return after a long period in which Zoom meetings became the norm.

And from a linguistic point of view, I realize it’s a word that’s slipped into being a fairly unconscious part of my vocabulary. For me at least, there was a time where I hesitated around what to call non-online interactions. Face-to-face was an obvious choice that had been around pre-pandemic but it felt a bit clunky. In some contexts, it could be reduced to f2f, but that didn’t work across speech and writing. In person as a phrase that comes after a verb is, of course, nothing new:

It was about six months before we met up in person.
... corresponded with him by e-mail and met him twice in person.
The profundity of the Kumbh Mela could only be experienced in person.
Discounted tickets must be purchased in person at the Dublin Zoo Ticket Office

[All examples in this post from the News on the Web (NOW) corpus at english-corpora.org]

What’s newer is its use as a modifier in front of a noun, mostly as a hyphenated form:

The pandemic all but stopped in-person community events.
The museum remained closed to in-person visitors for much of the year.
Restaurants and bars must close for in-person service but may remain open for pick-up or delivery.
Large, in-person gatherings like this were a rarity in 2020.

A year late?

When I looked at corpus evidence to see whether my sense of in-person coming into its own in 2022 was correct, I initially found I was behind the curve. Looking at stats from the NOW corpus, it clearly surges in use in 2020 and 2021, but actually drops off a bit in 2022.

When I looked a bit deeper though, what I found was a shift in context over time.  The top collocations through 2020 and 2021 were predominantly related to education - in-person learning, classes, instruction – which is unsurprising given the context of schooling over that period, switching between online learning and kids going back into school. This year’s top collocations though have seen a trend towards talking about in-person meetings and in-person interviews, which perhaps better reflects my own experience.

He reportedly summoned the company's software engineers to San Francisco headquarters for an in-person meeting.
If I'm facilitating an in-person meeting, I'll get to the room early to scope out the seating configuration.
The environmental impact of taking that trip for a one-hour in-person meeting becomes difficult to justify.
Whether it is a remote or in-person interview, be cautious that your answers don't seem rehearsed.
A lot of them required him to come for an in-person interview, and we were living six hours away.

I also wonder whether this will be a more enduring use. Where online education, at least at school level, was very much an emergency measure, it feels that meetings and interviews will continue to be a mix of online and in person. When we just need a quick, functional chat with a colleague, we’ll jump on a Zoom call, but when we really need a proper catch-up and to talk things over, we’ll opt for an old-school, face-to-face get-together. So, we need a retronym – a word that differentiates something that used to be the norm, but now needs to be explicitly stated, like a landline instead of a mobile phone, an acoustic guitar instead of an electric one, or a film camera instead of its now much-more-common digital counterpart. My hunch is that we’ll continue talking about in-person meetings for some time to come.