The sweary WotYs

The calendar year 2023 was a miserable one in countless ways — wars, abortion rights, record high temperatures, the decline and fall of Twitter/X — but it was the best of times for the mainstreaming of strong language. At the American Dialect Society’s 34th annual word of the year vote, held on the evening of January 5 in New York City, no fewer than six sweary lexical items — a historical record — were nominated for WotY honors. Two of them won in their respective categories, and one, enshittification, was named overall word of the year.

Here’s how it went down. (Note: I was not present at the vote but followed along as best as I could via various Bluesky accounts.)

Enshittification

Digital word of the year, overall word of the year

Back in February 2023, when I wrote about enshittification for Strong Language, I predicted that the noun and its verb counterpart, enshittify, were “primed for neologistic success.” Both were popularized by the journalist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow, whose January 21, 2023, post on “Tiktok’s enshittification” was quickly picked up by Wired and then spread far and wide. Doctorow put it like this:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Doctorow didn’t coin enshittification: As language researcher Barry Popik pointed out on Twitter/X, the word has appeared sporadically since 2013. But as Strong Language contributor and ADS “Among the New Words” editor Ben Zimmer observed in an email, “it was Doctorow’s specific framing of the word in terms of (shitty) digital platforms that made the word catch on.” In the ADS press release announcing the WotY vote, Ben put it this way: “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.”

Enshittification was the resounding choice of the attendees at the WotY voting session, receiving 158 votes. The runner-up, (derogatory) —a “parenthetical comment humorously appended after a word that might not be
expected to be derogatory” — received 121 votes.

FAFO

Acronym/initialism of the year

The initialism for “Fuck Around [and] Find Out” wasn’t new in 2023 — Jesse Sheidlower, author of The F Word, has traced it back to 2007. (The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremist movements in the U.S., says FAFO is a slogan associated with the neo-fascist Proud Boys.) But 2023 was a year in which FAFO met the ADS criterion of “newly prominent”: A lot of folks FA’d and, too late, FO.

In a January 2023 op-ed, the Washington Post’s Amanda Katz chided the ADS for not making FAFO its word of the year for 2022: It was in December 2022, she reminded readers, that Elon Musk kicked Kanye West off Twitter, as it was then known, “for tweeting an unflattering photo of the platform’s memelord-turned-overlord.” Musk explained his decision “[i]n a four-letter tweet that forced the actual adults following this squabble to look up what FAFO meant.”

Although generally speaking FAFO is a “warning that foolish actions will result in unwanted consequences,” as the ADS press release puts it, there has been at least one attempt to turn that meaning on its head. In 2023 an Anaheim, California, brewery called Bottle Logic introduced a bottled stout called FAFO; its creators assert that “the amount of fucking around you’re willing to do is directly proportional to the amount of finding out you’ll accomplish.”

FAFO sweatshirt via Shithead Steve

AITA

Runner-up, acronym/initialism of the year

The initialism for “Am I the Asshole?” received 47 votes to FAFO’s 177, putting it in second place in the category. It has gained prominence from a popular Reddit forum in which questioners ask the online audience to determine whether they are at fault in a particular situation.

LFG

Honorable mention, acronym/initialism of the year

I admit I was a little surprised to see the initialism for Let’s Fucking Go! among this year’s nominations: I associate it with the 2020 election season, when U.S. senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren made it her unofficial slogan. (See my January 2020 post.) Spelled out or shortened, it’s an exhortation to action, and it came in third in its category.

Cunty

Nominee, most useful/most likely to succeed

Cunty was one of two nominees in this category that originated in LGBTQ ballroom culture. (The other was mother as a term of endearment.) It’s an example of word reclamation: Whereas cunty has historically meant unpleasant or disagreeable, it may now mean “having an audaciously exceptional appearance or displaying fierce femininity.” For more on the C-word, see Michael Adams’s 2016 guest post, “Making Friends with ‘Cunt’.”

Assholocene

Nominee, most creative word of the year

Here’s what I wrote about assholocene in my own words-of-the-year post, on Substack:

Technically speaking, the era we’re living in is the Holocene, a word coined in 1897 from Greek words meaning “entirely new.” But thanks to enshittification you could also call it something bleaker, as Kyle Chayka reported in a “2023 in Review” essay for the New Yorker. What new label could we apply to “our chaotic historical moment”? Chayka’s suggestions include “the Terrible Twenties, the Long 2016, the Age of Emergency, Cold War II, the Omnishambles, the Great Burning, and” — my favorite — “the Assholocene.” I don’t often give thumbs-up to a portmanteau, but this one is a pretty great blend. The earliest citation I’ve found is from a June 25, 2023, Urban Dictionary entry: “the current period of human history in which people in power tend to be assholes.”

UPDATE, January 29: The Assholocene has been with us for longer than I’d known. Via email, Ben Zimmer provides evidence that it goes back to 2014 at least:

The earliest I’ve found is this Tumblr post from 2/15/14, which quotes snarky commentary from a message board on the (now-defunct) site sff.net about the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

https://informationjustwantstobefree.tumblr.com/
“Paleontologists of SFWA will one day refer to this as the Assholocene Era … ”

This was quoted in an International Business Times article from 2/19/14, which provides some context for the snark:

“Science Fiction Forum Shuns Women Writers: Warp Speed to the ‘Assholocene Era’?”

Gilly Youner was using it on Twitter in 2015, including in a reply to William Gibson:

https://twitter.com/gillyarcht/status/594579054235377664
https://twitter.com/gillyarcht/status/594579390887022592

Not sure where Kyle Chayka picked it up from — perhaps from this 10/26/2023 newsletter by Tadzio Müller:
https://steadyhq.com/en/friedlichesabotage/posts/a1c14c1a-feb9-42ec-9678-358be77f8d99

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See all of the ADS WotY nominations here. Were any important words overlooked? Let us know in a comment.

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For some background on how words of the year are chosen by the ADS and other voting bodies, see my January 2023 story for Medium, “Words of the Year, In and Out.”