Copyright © Françoise Herrmann
On January 5, 2024, the venerable American Dialect Society (ADS) selected the term enshittification as the Word Of The Year (WOTY) 2023. The neologism was coined by Cory Doctorow, an award-winning, Canadian-British, science fiction author, and blogger, who uses the term quite liberally. According to Dictionary.com:
“Enshitification means the gradual degradation of an online platform or service's functionality, as part of a cycle in which the platform or service first offers benefits to users to attract them, then pursues more and more profits at the expense of users.”
However, the scope of the term is far greater, considering all of its derivations found on Doctorow’s blog, such as enshittocene, enshittifified, The Great Enshittening, and occasionally a more positive twist, such as to disenshittify.”
Three hundred members of the ADS voted for enshiffication. All of them experts in matters of language, language change and language variation, they are linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. Members of the 134 year-old ADS institution, all voting in the 34th year of the Word of the Year (WOTY) event.
Ben Zimmer, Word on the Street columnist at The Wall Street Journal and Chair of the ADS New Words Committee, presided over the WOTY session, on the occasion of the Society’s Annual Meeting. A session that he co-chaired, this year in conjunction with Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright, the Committee’s official Data Czarina and experimental sociolinguistic activist.
Zimmer notes, in regard to the selection, that: “Enshittification is a sadly apt term for how our online lives have become gradually degraded. From the time that it first appeared in Doctorow’s posts and articles, the word had all the markings of a successful neologism, being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of contexts.”
A sad word indeed, now the beacon of a whole year.
References
American Dialect Society (ADS)
https://americandialect.org/
ADS - 2023 Word of the Year is enshittification.
https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/
ADS – All the Words of the Year, 1990 to present.
https://americandialect.org/woty/all-of-the-words-of-the-year-1990-to-present/
Cory Doctorow: An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse. YouTube video [01:08:42]
https://youtu.be/VT1ud0rAT7w
Dictionary.com (website)
Doctorow, C. (Jan 13, 2024). Tech workers and gig workers need each other. Each disenshittifies the other.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
Wright, K. E. (Jan 14, 2024). Disabling Linguistic Oppression with Experimental Sociolinguistics
https://kellywright5.wixsite.com/raciolinguistics
Zimmer, B. and L. Sutton (Jan. 5, 2024). American Dialect Society selects enshittification as 2023 Word of the Year. Press Release American Dialects Society.
https://americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf
Zimmer, B. (Jan 14, 2024). Word on the Street columnist at The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/news/author/ben-zimmer
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