I saw this list of Oxford words of the year for the UK:
I then looked up more words of the year on Wikipedia, here
Here are some of them
What struck me most was how many of them were a flash in the pan. Some of them are still in heavy use today, but so many were a product of their time. It shows how organic language is, and how it reflects culture. Slang also seems to be cycling more rapidly these days, as are most things. Driven by social media’s constant thirst for the new, I guess.
I do rather identify with the word brain rot though.
I wondered why I didn’t recognise many of the earlier Oxford words; they’re from the US column in the Wiki table… Must have been munged together somehow.
The UK words are much more populist/TV based; chav, bovvered, simples, omnishambles
I confess I don’t recall ever hearing ‘squeezed middle’, ‘youthquake’ or ‘goblin mode’. I must be so unhip. Or whatever word the rizz kids use these days… Allegedly ‘book’ became the word for ‘cool’ during the height of texting, because predictive text interpreted the keystrokes as ‘book’…