Oxford Word of the Year | Hacker News Reader

Oxford Word of the Year

languages.oup.com

40 pointsbookofjoe52 comments

Some people think they’re old because they didn’t know what rizz means.

I know I’m old because My teenage son visibly cringes when I say “rizz” around him.

Not a bad choice by Oxford. It’s fun to say and equal parts popular and unknown.

That's the fun part, lol. It gets worse though, rizz is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to modern day teenage slang/memes.

Please don't ban me for spamming. breathes in

Bros got that gyat rizz ohio among us pizza tower peppino fart ishowspeed shake shake shake ayo the bruh pizza here cuh kai cenat gyatttttt baby gronk spongebob grimace shake pinegrove shuffle renegade pokimane packgod leg mlg yee dattebayo sigma phonk nair video ToTS JTOH Majin Chomik Nattie Forskin quandale dingle goofy ahh BFDI four screech grassy pillow this is bob discord cat this is memecat PANIK kalm PANIK It's friday Davie504 Bass nyan cat sus t-pose nathaniel B big chungus goth pepe uganda knuckles Stop it get some help netflix naruto attack on titan man’s not hot naruto run complexuality the owl house me on mondays family guy south park american dad i be popping bottles nick eh 30 you think you’re the king i’m the king travis scott monster school i’m the king minecraft noob vs pro vs god vs hacker kevin macleod l + ratio bozo geometry dash florida man garten of banban skibidi toilet huggy wuggy rainbow friends do not buy this keyboard the rocky way sin city wasn’t made for you i’m the biggest bird HEEHEEHEEHA griddy doors the guiding light pibby owo uwu lightskin stare honey have you seen my iphone 378 ellen degeneres beyonce kanye west obama prism dragon ball z goku can he beat goku roblox slay delulu floptok you have angered the demon inside of me travis scott burger opium playboi carti destroy lonely ken carson america your mom rush tower defense simulator how to solve cube taco tuesday cg5

Amazing. For the first time, I am old enough to have never heard or read the OED word of the year.

And in a couple years it'll be considered old and cringe. Such is life, I suppose.

In the monthly chart in TFA it appears as though it became old and cringe the very month after it was popularised.

True. I miss when words and memes had a shelf life longer than milk left in the sun.

I'd say it has already happened.

Clearly not a meme fan. To be fair, that zoomer terminology is used on Instagram and TikTok. Pretty sure HN people are not into it.

I only became aware of it earlier this year because of people mocking it on other platforms. I'm too old to have experienced it organically.

I'm surprised that enough young people knew about DEC in 2021 for their line of minicomputers to be word of the year.

https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2021/

Ugh. Other than heat dome and prompt, every single one of those words feels like they have been pulled from the TikTok vocabulary.

>>they have been pulled from the TikTok vocabulary

“As we mentioned, we estimate that TikTok has about 80 million monthly active users in the United States. 60% are female, 40% are male. 60% are between the ages of 16-24. 26% are between the ages 25-44.”

Turns out when words are used by tens of millions of your younger populace, they’re actually just words for the general vocabulary, not the “TikTok vocabulary”

Swiftie has been around for the better part of a decade I believe, and definitely pre-dates Tik Tok

"Parasocial", while it is used in and even more particularly about social media phenomena, is much older than TikTok, social media, the web, or personal computers:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=parasocial&yea...

A lot of gen Z slang is actually AAVE, often from ten years+ prior but recently getting adopted by others via social media and games (that neither I nor most of you I suspect frequent). I only tangientally hear about it via Reddit.

To save you a click: it’s “rizz”, short for “charisma”. Yawn.

But it's more fun than that because it's also used as a verb, as in to "rizz up," meaning to attract.

That and the z sound is just fun to say out loud and leads to other fun jokey terms like "rizzler" and "rizzard".

Don't forget the lengthened form charizard [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charizard

LOL at the people self-reporting how old they are by not knowing the word "rizz". It's been an immensely popular word among people under 30 for a while now, so I'm not surprised at all.

I must live under a rock, I'm under 30 and never heard it until this thread.

I also had an old person moment, nearly yelling at the clouds about these made up words, but was grounded when they showed similar examples of 'fridge' and 'flu.'

I'm middle-aged and still dealing with what "simp" is.

Is it short for simpleton?

It should be.

IIRC it used to be but it kind of got mutated as people specifically called men who fawn over uninterested women simps until it was exclusively used for that case and similar. I wonder if other pieces of slang used to be broader than they are now.

Etymologically, it might be - it's not really clear. But the meaning is "to be (excessively) subservient to a person or cause" / "someone who is [...]". So a simp/simping is (an accusation of) being (excessively) in favor of a person or cause, such as simping for a character, an idol, a real person, or a political party. Especially used for men who praise a certain woman over and over.

Etymologically, probably, but its most specifically, in its current popular use, about a person with a strong parasocial attachment to someone else, particularly one that is sexually-tinged.

Very commonly used to describe relationships of devoted followers to social media figures.

I had known simp from tales of carnies (in carnie slang it was used for the suckers who lose money on rigged games) and so when I first saw it on Reddit as used by frustrated males, it was easy to make the connection. See etymology 1 at Wiktionary[0] with a first attestation from 1903!

The people who know only the contemporary meaning must be orders of magnitude larger than those who knew the early 20th century word, though.

[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/simp

Meh. It only gained traction in early 2022. It’s mostly used in meme format, so I wouldn’t say it is “immensely” popular unless your only source of entertainment is short-form videos.

In and of itself it is a meaningless word that only has temporary meaning in the context of someone creating content around it.

When I first heard this used, my immediate thought was that it was a reference to the Uk brand of cigarette paper, Rizla, and clearly something to do with smoking pot

Sadly, it’s a more mundane contraction

Same here.

Though the brand is actually French. And normally (at least in French) the 'z' is silent. It's a difficult brand to pronounce because it's written (or used to be written) "riz la +", which is pronounced "riz la croix" ('z' is silent an literally "rice the cross") because it was originally rice paper and the company was founded by a guy named "Lacroix"... OK that was an OT anecdote.

I've spent a fair amount of time around alpha/Z lately and have never heard them say rizz or any of the other buzz slang. In fact, I usually hear these words from older people proclaiming they don't know what they mean and that the new generations are indecipherable based on some article they read.

The new stand out from the old with their new words and the old stand out from the new by saying they don't understand these (foolish) new words. People are quick to claim they do or don't understand to signal their alignment with one or the other but a lot of these words aren't even used out of this or some ironic context. At least not in real life speech.

That being said, as entertaining as rizz is, prompt and parasocial are monumentally more significant.

I personally believe that the popularity of the word charisma itself comes mainly from Dungeons and Dragons.

TL;DR: "Rizz", short for charisma.

FWIW, I was introduced to this word by a pastor on TikTok of all places. A seemingly odd occurrence, but I've found a few good resources there for keeping up to date with modern English (which seems to be evolving faster and faster to my Xenial brain).

Just a reminder that the purpose of selecting and publicizing a Word of the Year is not to make a statement about the importance or value of the word, or observe something about the culture. The purpose is to get people to remember that Oxford University Press exists, and get them talking about it for a few hours a year. To the extent that we feel obliged to weigh in on whether this is a bad choice or not, we're doing the homework they've assigned us.

"Gen Z shit" as I'd like to categorize it, no offense

I am Gen Z and I do not approve of the word "rizz" :)

Am I so out of touch?

No. It's the children who are wrong.

“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"

Such a skibidi response.

What's with the comments giving angry boomer energy? Just because you don't know something, doesn't mean you should be proud of it. Word of the year has been a mix of popular culture and slang for decades. Rizz is a great addition.

I agree it’s a nice word, but it’s the same energy to laugh at people for being old because they don’t know what it means.

Boomer? Do you realise that boomers are over 60 now, so that there is a massive gap between 'young' and 'boomer'...

Yes which is why I believe OP is asking why on a fairly young message board, the response is stereotypical of someone over age 60.

It is 'fairly' stereotypical to assume 'young' (what's the cut off?). And it is definitely stereotypical and ageist to assume this means 'over 60'.

I am in my 40s. Boomers are my parents. I had never heard of that word...

Knowledge of these latest slang words fades fast during your late twenties, definitely 30s, IMHO.

The descent continues ...

I was 100% aware of this word ... but ... Oxford Word of the Year?

Slow year.

English vocabulary will decrease until culture improves (or something like that)

So one of the runners up was "prompt" and somehow "rizz" won? I feel like if any one word describes the chaos this year, it's "prompt" I haven't even heard someone use the word rizz throughout thousands of youtube videos I've watched this year.

I guess my assumption about this is that it's meant to kind of "cement a single word that represents the state of the year" and, if that's the case, "prompt" not winning is a pretty bad look. A way to say "hey look, we're irrelevant!" BUT if my assumption is wrong, I don't understand the point of this declaration at all.

rizz is plastered all over tiktok.

ah.. that makes sense. I haven't spent any time on tiktok in years.

It's probably the same in my case as I don't even have a tiktok account.

"Rizz" has been used way more than the AI meaning of "prompt" this past year. Like not even remotely comparable.

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