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.

Words of an Odd Year

At this time of year, dictionaries announce their Words of the Year. It’s a bit of a publicity exercise, to be honest, and not something to set too much store by, but still fun to see what gets chosen. This year’s selections have been a bit of a mixed bag and many of them have left me thinking “hmm, odd choice” - but then maybe that appropriately reflects what an odd, discombobulating sort of year it’s been.

WOTY

Different dictionary publishers use different criteria to choose their Words of the Year, some of which are clearly stated, some less so. Cambridge’s choice is based (largely) on the most popular word that people have looked up on their dictionary website and this year was announced as perseverance - which at first sight seems an odd choice. It’s popularity was linked to the NASA Mars rover called Perseverance that landed back in February. It saw a huge spike in lookups, likely from two sources - English learners who wanted to know what the word meant and also L1 English speakers who wanted to check the spelling. To me, it feels like a slightly odd choice, regardless of the stats, just because it refers to such a specific moment, quite early in the year, but I guess it does also chime with the perseverance we’ve all had to demonstrate in living through a second year with Covid.

Collins, on the other hand, have gone down the new coinages route, choosing novel words and terms that have appeared, or at least gained a foothold, this year. Their shortlist was topped by NFT or non-fungible token - yes, exactly, neither do I! Again, it feels a slightly left-field choice, but their shortlist more generally does reflect some of the themes of the year with several tech-related words (NFT, metaverse and crypto), some pandemic words (double-vaxxed, pingdemic and hybrid working) and miscellaneous others - as I said, it has been a miscellaneous sort of a year, so maybe that’s appropriate.

Oxford went for perhaps the most obvious choice, vax, with an accompanying report into the language of vaccines. American dictionary, Merriam-Webster also went for vaccine. Probably for many of us, it is the word that best reflects the year, but then it doesn’t provoke much debate, does it, or make you read on to find out why.

I think my favourite WOTY comes from the Australian National Dictionary Centre who plumped for strollout - apparently a term to describe the slow pace of the vaccination rollout in Australia. Yes, it’s one of those gimmicky buzzwords that was probably coined by a headline writer, but it does definitely tell you something about a time and a place.

Words of My Year

From a professional point of view, I’ve worked on a mix of projects this year that have had me delving into different types of vocabulary. I started off the year researching idioms and phrasal verbs for new editions of two books - Work on Your Idioms and Work on Your Phrasal Verbs (both for Collins). We were focusing on the most frequently-used items in each group, so not necessarily touching on low-frequency trending words. However, we did add call out to the unit on Reporting in the media, which I think has proved to be quite key this year, with unacceptable behaviour being called out in all kinds of areas of life. Here are a few key collocates I found from recent corpus data.

Recently, I’ve spent more time than you would think is feasible researching prefixed words for another project. I’m not sure that any of them would be candidates for WOTY, but to continue the ‘odd year’ theme, they’ve definitely sent me off in some peculiar directions, including getting to grips with the philosophical concept behind antirationalism and trying to understand the physics of multipole.

I’ve also spoken about language change - and its relevance to ELT - at a number of events, both this year and last. What struck me when I was putting together my most recent session for TESOL France was the degree to which I needed to update my examples of coronavirus-related vocabulary. Words that had sprung up in the early days of the pandemic when we were all coming to terms with lockdowns - like coronadodging (trying to avoid people on the pavement to maintain social distance) and quarantinis (quarantine cocktails, sometimes shared with friends via Zoom) - already feel quite passé and have instead been replaced by terms that reflect the place of Covid as a mundane reality in our everyday lives - like corona-related and covid-appropriate.

On a more personal note, I think one word I’ve used a lot in 2021 has been hermity - as in, I’m getting quite hermity. (Yes, it’s a made-up word. Apparently, hermitic or hermitical is the adjective from hermit, but doesn’t feel quite the same) After so long staying at home, avoiding crowded places and barely travelling, I’ve definitely got used to a more isolated sort of existence and my re-entry is proving to be a slow one. Although there have been few official restrictions in the UK since the summer, I’ve felt wary about getting back to normal activities and have continued to mostly stay at home - partly out of caution and a sense of social responsibility, but if I’m honest, as much out of habit. I’m still feeling that life is very much 'on pause', so for 2022, I’m hoping that something will prompt me to 'press play' again.