By Chiranjib Haldar
The year gone by was a year of climate quandaries and content fatigue. Sociologists warn that whenever there is content abundance, the icing gets slushier with the cake tasting mushy. If we notice the trending words picked up by Oxford University Press and the dictionary troika of Cambridge-Collins-Merriam Webster; rage bait, slop, parasocial, vibecoding, a thought process fawns. The words unveil societal consciousness and cultural shifts that encapsulate our angsts and values. Besides the pervasive influence of artificial intelligence, these word picks of 2025 offer a revealing snapshot of our obsessions and fears. Collaborations, strategic tagging and influencers have their roles and thus what is trending may be far from reality. Commonality clearly shows how technology is converting our psyche and objectives. So words of the year are also curated mandates for modern marketers.
Algorithms are hunting down our preferences at every level and making us passive. Let us assume, you are not a stock market trader or punter or even an investor. Maybe you have made occasional forays to invest in the bourses. A casual search or two about a company’s share price or future prospects reveals a dozen articles from fund houses, brokerages and financial institutions. Countless options spew out with alarming alacrity to entice us into doing something we have not tried. Though an enormous convenience, it comes at a price. For many, it may be a mode of release but for many an induced activity.
If random ‘likes’ often compulsive for acquaintances have trivialised genuine appreciation, popularity is now a misnomer for the number of clicks as inducement. Maybe it’s time to put the genuine meaning of authenticity in the back-burner. Let us all accept that our social media reels are not our own selves but carefully curated extensions of our persona, like little aspirational objects. Our ideal delusional self is an important part of our imagined identity. There are manifold social media options and the choices are deliberate and compulsive. These social media outlets are like a slew of sleep panaceas sometimes addictive. After all, sleep and mental rest are now increasingly coveted aspirations for individuals.
In other words, we are improving at pretending to be real. Snacking, chilling or watching some cringe content on over-the-top (OTT) platforms entices us into passivity. Responding to friends passively on social media is a way of validating their stance, be it with a like or an emoji. There is an entire virtual world waiting to engulf you, intoxicate and finally make you oblivious of life’s other necessities. Mindless scrolling through reels on Facebook or Meta is like an opiate, it benumbs the senses more than excites. And in a world in which we carefully craft digital selves, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish personality from persona. A figment of distorted perceptions is actually endorsing a worrying trend.
Hence, lexicons anointing specific words and stressing their current contexts is more of a reflection of society from desktop warriors to mobile touchscreen beacons. Endless scrolls are an invention of today’s ethos. Attention deficit syndrome seems to have gripped all of us. Dealing with the relentless flow of the digital world has some unwarranted consequences. Social media algorithms churn out mind-boggling sets. The being and nothingness of time is best experienced in scrolling through options, reels and stories though there may not be any underlying need for these. If this is merely the beginning of the AI revolution, one shudders to think what lies ahead. Mental escape valves may well govern our choices in future. The power of a hashtag is remarkable and language may be evolving according to digital nuances. Oxford University Press’ word rage bait has also entered political discourse, with outrage used to boost politicians’ profiles and provoke a chain of reactions and counter reactions.
One of the most searched terms or the words looked up umpteen times on websites vie for being nominated as words of the year. The mass distribution of almost everything has its repercussions on society. Indian Khadi is often a ‘humble’ fabric but designers who exhibit in upscale galleries and lounges have ‘arrived’. Webster’s word of the year slop has gained such traction that it is not merely a word. The flood of slop in 2025 include absurd videos, fake advertising images, cheesy propaganda and junk AI-written books. It may have become our ideological default setting, an objective arbiter of meaning for the electorate.
Two decades back ‘Carbon footprint’ was selected as the word of 2004, during a time of rising environmental cognizance while ‘climate emergency’ in 2019 reflected an exigent call to tackle climate change. In tandem, ‘post-truth’ (2016) defined a world where emotions and opinions eclipsed facts. The words of the year showcase how language captures and influences our socio-political milieu.
Chiranjib Haldar
(The writer is a commentator on politics and society.)
