Chapter 1: What are the Words of the Year for 2025 and why do they matter?
Alrighty folks, today we are going to go through the words of the year 2025 from all of the dictionaries. They all pick a new word of the year. We're going to go through those in just a minute. Apparently, according to Time Magazine, the Oxford Dictionary has declared the word of the year rage bait.
Apparently, it was first used online in 2002 in a posting on the online forum Usenet to describe drivers' reactions to other drivers flashing their lights at them when seeking to pass in an apparent deliberate attempt to provoke.
It's funny to see how these things grow. Of course, rage bait now just means that you're posting something online in order to draw rage from others. And that I think is a pretty good word of the year. A lot of rage bait being posted online these days. And I've heard it used in a couple of ways in the online space.
One is that you are posting something in order to earn the clicks and the virality off of others being enraged. And so you are posting it and then you say, this is rage bait. Meaning like, yeah, we're supposed to be enraged. And then there is also just kind of trollery that generates rage itself. And that's also, I've seen used as sort of rage bait.
Chapter 2: What does 'rage bait' reveal about online culture?
Like don't take the bait, don't take. But I think the general idea, which is that most Americans now, a huge number of Americans and people globally, are being emotionally manipulated in the online space by stories that sometimes are true and sometimes are false, but are all rage bait. I think this is totally right.
You do not experience rage bait nearly as much in your real life as you do in the online space. The online space is programmed to give you the stuff that generates a viral emotional response in you. That's what rage bait is all about. So that's actually not a bad pick by Oxford. McCary Dictionary, known as the arbiter of Australian English, has picked a word of the year.
It is AI slop, which is defined as low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors and not requested by the user. Now, again, you can see this term kind of shifting and moving in real time.
So AI slop originally meant Will Smith being unable to eat spaghetti on AI, just like total junk that didn't look real, kind of inhabited the strange, uncanny valley where AI was hallucinating and generating weirdnesses, people with nine fingers and such. AI slop now is being used to mean AI content that very often looks real, but is just created in order to get you to click on it.
So people will say that's just AI slop.
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Chapter 3: How is 'AI slop' defined and why is it significant?
And what they mean is that it is a piece of viral content like man fights gorilla and gorilla pummels man that looks extremely real, but actually isn't real. And that's AI slop. But you can see that changing. Why? Because the AI has gotten better. So when AI slop first got presented, it was, this doesn't look as good as human crafted stuff.
It doesn't look as good as either real video or human beings doing art. The computers are basically generating stuff that looks like second rate human work. But now as the AI has gotten better and better, as you look at what VO is doing or Sora, and it looks pretty much identical to reality. Now AI slop,
It just means AI that I don't want, or AI that I don't like, or AI that's generated in order to just get clicks, as opposed to improve the quality of our world.
Cambridge Dictionary has parasocial, which it defines as, quote, involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they don't know, a character in a book, film, TV series, or artificial intelligence. This word first appeared in 1956 in an academic article called Mass Communication and Parasocial Interaction.
Apparently now, again, it's become very common because people have decided to emotionally invest themselves in people they don't know. So for example, if you're very invested in Tay-Tay getting married, that's because you have a parasocial relationship with her.
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Chapter 4: What does 'parasocial' mean in today's digital age?
That's been true for a very long time. People have always identified with pop culture icons. They've always followed the gossip pages and all the rest. But because our connection with reality has become so weak, Because we spend so much time online, it is easier and easier to form these parasocial relationships with either AIs or with celebrities, certainly people you don't know.
And even the people you quote unquote do know, you don't really know. You might have a relationship with somebody using a screen name and you have no idea who that person is. That is a form of parasocial relationship.
Again, one of the common themes here is how tech has really wrecked our emotional relationships with others, whether it is rage bait, or whether it is AI slop, or whether it is parasocial. There's no question that tech is radically changing how we perceive the world and how we interact with the world.
All right, Collins Dictionary, their word of the year is vibe coding, which is apparently a slang term defined as, quote, the use of AI prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code. So instead of painstakingly coding a new app, you actually just tell the AI to code for you a new program. This was coined by a co-founder of OpenAI named Andrej Karpathy.
And he described it as a type of computer coding where you fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.
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Chapter 5: How is 'vibe coding' changing the landscape of programming?
So the LLMs basically do the heavy lifting on creative programming code. Again, this is how things are being shifted now. Do I think vibe coding is bad?
No, actually, I think that probably we're going to get some pretty incredible apps because of vibe coding, meaning knowing how to code was a barrier to entry to be able to actually create in cheap and efficacious fashion, some form of app or website or whatever.
Being able to code just by typing in some prompts is pretty incredible, but I don't think it's coincidence that everything is now tied up in tech and AI. This episode is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Your online activity isn't private. Data brokers track your habits, beliefs and spending and then they legally sell that information. Corporations use it to target ads. Platforms manipulate what you see.
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Chapter 6: What does '6-7' signify among today's youth?
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Finally, dictionary.com has six, seven as its word of the year, which is not actually a word. Obviously it is two words. So, although I am generally aware of the origins of 6-7 because my kids and all of their friends use this idiotic and annoying term, I did ask our sponsors over at Comet a project of perplexity. What does 6-7 mean? And where does it come from? And why do the kids use it?
Chapter 7: How do these new words reflect the impact of technology on communication?
And according to Comet, 6-7 is a mostly nonsense catchphrase kids yell as a joke and in-group signal. It does not have one real fixed meaning, so it's very postmodern. It started online from a rap song and some viral basketball clips, and then it spread into schools where kids use it because it's funny, annoying, and makes them feel part of the group.
This is definitely how kids use it, is that they randomly just shout 6-7, and then everybody laughs because it has no meaning. Apparently, the phrase comes from a drill rap song, Doot Doot, by Skrilla, where the lyric 6-7 hits right on a beat drop. And then that sound clip was used in a TikTok Instagram YouTube edit of NBA player LaMelo Ball, who is 6'7".
And then there was a viral video of a boy at a basketball game screaming 6-7 with a big hand gesture turned into the 6-7 kid. And then that apparently, you know, made it very, very popular. You know, the reality is that my kids don't know where it came from. They just know that all their friends use it. They're not listening to Skrilla songs and they have no idea who LaMelo Ball is.
But it demonstrates that stupidities can go viral with the young at any time, at any time. And there's a long history of words that are sort of like the 6-7, in-group signals that kids use that don't mean anything. I'm always reminded of that line that Tommy Lee Jones uses in The Fugitive. One of his colleagues says that something is hinky. And he says, what does hinky mean?
And the guy says, I don't know, you know, hinky. He says, don't use words that have no meaning around me. I'm a Tommy Lee Jones. Okay, so if you have words that you think ought to have been the word of the year, submit them below and we'll see you here in a bit.
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