Oxford Word of the Year 2022: 'goblin mode'

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3 points·vanilla-almond··6 comments

"Goblin Mode" Isn't a word. Its two words. Goblin. And Mode.

I've also never heard anyone use the term before now. And reading the article, it seems it had a brief popularity on Twitter back in March and then faded away. Does that really qualify something as the word of the year?

I saw evidence of an online movement to push people to vote for ‘goblin mode’ to displace ‘cringiverse’ (a.k.a. metaverse).

Certainly this is only reflective of people who live on social media. No one in my admittedly small circles actually use this word, and rarely any of the previous OU words of the year, in actual human to human conversations. It's almost more of a Twitter aphorism (Twittorism) popularity contest.

With that being said, I submit Twittorism as a candidate for 2023's word of the year.

Look at my comment. 2020 was a doozy.

2015: the tears of joy emoji

2016: post-truth

2017: youthquake

2018: toxic

2019: climate emergency

2020: (yes, 47 of them) allyship, anthropause, anti-masker, BC (before COVID), black lives matter, blm, blursday, bubble, cancel culture, circuit breaker, community transmission, coronavirus, covid-19, covidiot, decolonize, defund, doomscrolling, flatten the curve, furlough, hygiene theatre, infodemic, Juneteenth, learning modality, lockdown, mail-in, moonshot, net zero, pandemic, personal protective equipment, plandemic, PPE, R number, rona, sanny, self-isolate, social distancing, superspreader, systemic racism, take a knee, twindemic, unmute, veronica bucket, virtue-signalling, wet market, wokeness, workation, zoombombing

2021: vax

Starting with Anglo-Norman “gobeling,” there are some interesting specializations. “Redcaps” are goblins wearing hats dyed with human blood.

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