Terminology – The American Dialect Society competing 2021 WOTTIES (2)

Copyright © Françoise Herrmann

The American Dialect Society (ADS) competing Words of the Year (WOTTIES) are no less interesting than the winners. Below, the list of the competing WOTTIES, in each of the 2021 Word of the Year categories. (1)

The Word of the Year 2021 (extracted from the ADS Press Release)

• antiwork: position supporting the refusal to work, pushing back against labor exploitation.
• Big Lie: propagandistic distortion of truth, as in Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was “stolen”. 
• Great Resignation: pandemic-era phenomenon in which workers are leaving their jobs in large numbers. 
• long Covid: lingering symptoms and health problems experienced by people after they have recovered from Covid. 
• Omicron: name assigned by the World Health Organization for a highly contagious “variant of concern” of the coronavirus. 
• variant: new form of a virus, such as coronavirus, resulting from mutations. 
• vax/vaxx: shortened form of vaccine, vaccination, or vaccinate, often used as combining form (as in anti-vaxxer, Hot Vax Summer, double/triple-vaxxed, vaxxed and relaxed). 

Most likely to succeed Word of the Year 2021

• endemic: describing a disease that is always present in a community or population, as some predict will be the case for Covid-19. 
  
• Great Resignation: pandemic-era phenomenon in which workers are leaving their jobs in large numbers.
• mid: of average or poor quality, or simply  decent, in the amorphous Generation Z slang.
• NFT: abbreviation for non-fungible token, a digital asset using blockchain technology to make a unique token, with its own identification that cannot be replicated. 
• sigma male: term used in the masculinist “manosphere” for a male who is more introverted than an “alpha male” but is still considered successful. 
• shrinkflation: reduction of the size or quantity of a product while the price remains the same or  even rises.

Most useful Word of the Year 2021

• bussin’: extremely good, such as food that is indescribably tasty. 
• tone indicator: code such as “/srs” or "/lol" that indicates the tone (serious, ironic, humorous) of online discourse.
• vibe: mood or emotion, such as the positive feelings evoked by a piece of music; to exult in one’s good feelings. 

Political Word of the Year 2021

• Big Lie: propagandistic distortion of truth, as in Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was “stolen”.
• CRT/critical race theory: framework for analyzing how racism is embedded in law and policies, exploited as a scare tactic by politicians favoring “anti-CRT” legislation.
• mandate: official or authoritative command, as in politically contentious “mask mandates” and “vaccine mandates”. 

Digital Word of the Year 2021

• bones day/no bones day: prediction of whether a day will be good or bad (based on Jonathan Graziano’s TikTok videos of his dog Noodle getting up in the morning). See Youtube video below.
• girlboss: a confident, capable woman pursuing business ambitions; also used in a derogatory fashion for a woman cynically combining feminism with careerism.
• horny jail: imagined place a person is sent to as punishment for being excessively sexual on social media.
• parasocial: describing a relationship that a person imagines with someone whom they do not actually know, such as a celebrity on an online platform.
• the ___ urge to: ironic framing device to describe stereotypical tendencies and traits, as in “the feminine urge to…”

Pandemic-related Word of the Year 2021 

• breakthrough: describing an infection, as from coronavirus, after a person has been vaccinated.
• Delta/Omicron: Greek-letter names assigned by the World Health Organization for coronavirus “variants of concern”.
• flurona: sickness from a combination of the influenza virus and the coronavirus. 
• long Covid: lingering symptoms and health problems experienced by people after they have recovered from Covid.
• variant: new form of a virus, such as coronavirus, resulting from mutations.
• vax/vaxx: shortened form of vaccine, vaccination, or vaccinate, often used as combining form (as in anti-vaxxer, Hot Vax Summer, double/triple-vaxxed, vaxxed and relaxed).

Financial/economic Word of the Year 2021

• Great Resignation: pandemic-era phenomenon in which workers are leaving their jobs in large numbers.
• NFT: abbreviation for non-fungible token, a digital asset using blockchain technology to make a unique token, with its own identification that cannot be replicated.
•  SPAC: abbreviation for “special purpose acquisition company”, an investment vehicle that allows a company to go public without going through the traditional IPO process.
• stimmy: shortened form of stimulus, used in reference to government stimulus checks. 
• stonk: deliberate misspelling of stock, used by online day traders for their investments, esp. for “meme stocks” like Gamestop (aka Gamestonk).

Informal Word of the Year 2021

• cheugy: term used by members of Generation Z to poke fun at the off-trend lifestyles and fashions of millennials.
• down bad: used to describe intense (typically sexual) desperation.
• flop era: time in which a person, such as a pop star, enters an unsuccessful period.

Most creative word of the year 2021

• chin diaper: face mask worn below the chin instead of properly covering the nose and mouth.
• copium: the rationalizations, justifications, and denial one uses to deal with a severe letdown or personal failure (a blend of cope and opium).
•  -core: productive suffix for aesthetic trends, such as gorpcore (functional outdoorsy gear), emancicore (non-restrictive clothing emphasizing freedom), and goblincore (chaotic aesthetic inspired by goblin folklore).

Euphemism of the year 2021

• election integrity: euphemism used for voter suppression.
• glizzy: slang term for a hot dog (also used to describe fellatio, as in glizzy gobbling). 
• TFG: abbreviation for “the former guy,” an expression used by President Biden to refer to his predecessor Trump without saying his name.

___________ 

Note

(1) Members of the ADS voted for the winners , in each category, on the occasion of the Society’s 133rd Annual Meeting (online), on January 6-7, 2022. The winning 2021 Words of the Year, selected by the members of the American Dialect Society, are listed in the previous post.

References

American Dialect Society  https://www.americandialect.org/ 

Word of the Year – American Dialect Society.

https://www.americandialect.org/2021-word-of-the-year-is-insurrection 

Word of the Year – American Dialect Society. - Press Release.
https://www.americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2021-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf