The two words of the year
Genz slang made it Oxford. The word of the year 2023 is “rizz” and it comes straight outta the Z-ghetto. That’s a pun of mine for referring to the Gen-Z community of the deep internet, it doesn’t exist but I thought of the word ‘ghetto’ to highlight the concept that my generation's lingo is still left at the margins of academic linguistics acceptance and approval. You can get back at me on that, but it doesn’t matter because this is not the point of the article. My point, this time, is to show you how this new word, appointed by the Oxford University Press as the word of the year, “rizz”, put together with the word of the year chosen by the Webster Dictionary, "authentic", can tell us more about our society than it meets the eye.
It went more or less like this: the other day I was talking to my copywriter boyfriend. I was asking for advice on what to put in a social media content plan for January, and he told me: “you could say something about the word of the year: ‘authentic’”. I was confused, Oxford said "rizz", where does that "authentic" come from? I started my research.
It turned out that, first of all, also the Merriam-Webster Dictionary—one of the U.S.A’s most prominent dictionaries, if not the most prominent one— does its ‘word of the year’ thing, and second of all, that me and my boyfriend live in two different digital bubbles—mine being the BrE, his the AmE—and we never found out before this.
However, Webster chose for 2023, in fact, the word ‘authentic’. At this point I was very interested in commenting on these two rather different—but not too much?--- word choices, and is there a better place than Blogwig to dive into that? I don’t think so.
Rizz
It’s so new that nobody uses it yet. Google doesn’t know it, Ludwig knows and it says “that’s slang tho, you shouldn’t be putting that in your essay”, people seldom use it if not on TikTok, then why Sir Oxford decided to go for it instead of ‘prompt’ or ‘Swiftie’?
The Oxford University Press is the publishing house of the homonym British University. Almost every University, as you may know, has a press department, but some of them have it bigger than others. Oxford has been publishing it since 2004, almost 20 years! Furthermore they also have the Hindi Word of the year—unfortunately just for 2019 ans 2020—so it’s something they really care for.
According to the official website of OUP (Oxford University Press), the word of the year is chosen for the relevance it had throughout the previous 12 months. Lexicologists and linguists throughout the whole English speaking community gather to vote it among a range of the most used, relevant and popular words of the year and then publish the chosen word.
Fun fact: the word of the year doesn’t have to be part of the English dictionary! That’s what Oxford says:
To have been selected as Word of the Year means that a word has great resonance for the year in which it was chosen, but there is no guarantee that it, or the other words on the shortlist, will make it into an Oxford dictionary. Many of our Word of the Year shortlist words do immediately get added to premium.oxforddictionaries.com or are added as new senses of existing words. We want our dictionaries to be as up-to-date as possible and now update them on almost a daily basis. So chances are that even if the word is not added to the dictionary when it is announced as Word of the Year, it will be very soon.
Let us head straight to the point now: why “rizz”? Apparently, Rizz is the shortened version of “Charisma”, with the ‘s’ being substituted by a double ‘z’—hear me out—probably because it was invented by gen z. This is completely scientifically inappropriate and I have no proof nor evidence to demonstrate that, just take it as a joke. It would have been so fun if it had been true though. Nevermind.
That’s the Oxford explanation for their choice:
2023 marked the era of personal – and professional – PR. And what does it take to command attention? A whole lot of charisma, or the shortened form, ‘rizz’. Pertaining to someone’s ability to attract another person through style, charm, or attractiveness, this term is from the middle part of the word ‘charisma’, which is an unusual word formation pattern. Other examples include ‘fridge’ (refrigerator) and ‘flu’ (influenza)
Apparently, the usage of the word grew dramatically in 2023, to the point that it arrived to the mass media through Tom Holland, who stated, in an interview later this year, that he has ‘no rizz whatsoever”. This means two things: firstly, that if Holland managed to articulate it in an interview it means the word is part of the public domain enough to be perceived as understandable by the majority of the targeted audience, in Holland’s case, late millennials and gen z. Secondly, we should tell Tom Holland more how much we like him.
Now we are at the point in which we either have ‘rizz’ as a noun, but also as a verb (a phrasal verb nonetheless) and you can use ‘rizz up’ in phrases to mean ‘to attract, seduce, or chat up (a person)’ (UOP, 2023).
Since Oxford Languages is based both in the UK and in the US, sometimes they try to choose two different words for the two Unions, but most of the time they try to keep them together under the same words:
Over the last few years, we’ve chosen words that capture the imagination on both sides of the Atlantic. This perhaps reflects the increasingly global nature of language and communication and how quickly the use of new words or meanings can travel from one side of the globe to the other.
However, Webster saw it differently.
Authentic
Webster opted for something more ‘traditional’, meaning something that is already inn the dictionary, and has been for quite a time now:
Has a number of meanings including “not false or imitation,” a synonym of real and actual; and also “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” [...] ‘Authentic’ is often connected to identity, whether national or personal.
The reason why they chose it rang a bell:
And with the rise of artificial intelligence—and its impact on deepfake videos, actors’ contracts, academic honesty, and a vast number of other topics—the line between “real” and “fake” has become increasingly blurred.[...] Authentic is what brands, social media influencers, and celebrities aspire to be.” [...] Ironically, with “authentic content creators” now recognized as the gold standard for building trust, “authenticity” has become a performance.
So if you look closer, authentic and rizz have way more evident things in common than it meets the eye. When comparing the two definitions, both nouns belong to the etymological sphere of—as Oxford put it—the professional and non-professional PR. In short, they both are involved in describing the self on social media. Often these are two necessary conditions to ‘make it’ on instagram. You have rizz? Are you authentic? You get the views. Supposedly.
It looks like the words chosen to represent the English language of 2023 are both very connected to the Internet. So far, not surprised. It is quite interesting, though, how much both these words are related to the concept of external appearance. In the Internet, written or non-written content is often reduced to the bone, at the expense of complexity, to favour the aesthetic appeal of it, to please faster-paced, attention-lacking audiences. What is the real meaning of ‘authentic’, in this environment? Taking all the AI discourse aside ( that’s another article), what did all those people mean when they said the world ‘authentic’ this year? Did they use it to define themselves, did they use it to describe how they wanted to be perceived? And again: what does it take to have the rizz? If TikTok is all about rizz now, does that mean people are going to sacrifice authenticity to rizz followers up?
I know, that’s a lot of questions, but answers are the boring part, if you think about it. In my opinion, if authentic is the most used word on the net, it might as well be the most abused. Rizz, on the other hand, is a pretty funny word, but I wonder if there wouldn’t have been anything more relevant than that, if there weren’t any words that could tell us more about the often-too-neglected offline world.
Is it a positive, progressive attitude, to focus so much on the internet language? Or is it maybe too pervasive, too detached from the analogical reality? Is the authentic world losing its rizz?
Happy New Year.
Cheerio.
