Suzanne Harrington: Forget 'rizz', my word of the year is 'overwhelm'

Suzanne Harrington: "Have you got your own personal word to sum up the year?" Pic: Denis Scannell

It’s that time of year when – in a bid to save ourselves from losing our shit in the over-scented gift box aisle of overheated shops because they’re playing Last Christmas again – we may try to distract the remains of our brain with something that has become an annual ritual: words of the year, chosen by the compilers of dictionaries. 

What began in Germany in 1971 went English-speaking dictionary mainstream in 2003; this year, in keeping with the dystopian hellscape theme of 2023, they mostly relate to AI.

Free of AI context, the two words chosen by Merriam-Webster in the US and Cambridge in the UK – authentic and hallucinate – mean something wonderful; authenticity as a foundation on which to build your life, and hallucinate as an occasional mental health boost on a psilocybin-assisted nature walk. What’s not to like?

But that’s not what the dictionaries mean. 

Their definition of authentic is in relation to AI and online falsity, in an era where we are all obsessed with being our authentic selves. 

Projecting authenticity has become a kind of performance art. Taylor Swift is so ‘authentic’ that Forbes ran a piece, Three Ways To Tap Into Taylor Swift’s Authenticity and Build An Eras-Like Workplace. This is not a parody. 

Merriam’s other words of 2023 included deepfake and dystopian. It’s like we fainted and woke up in some low-budget sci-fi series directed by an intelligent fridge gone rogue.

As for hallucinate, again it refers to AI-generated fakery: “When an artificial intelligence hallucinates, it produces false information,” says the Cambridge dictionary. 

This is not a comforting thought to carry forward to 2024 – should we start making predictions about what next year’s word may end up being? Zombie apocalypse? Robot death spiral? 

You find yourself aching with nostalgia for simpler times, when dictionaries chose such innocuities as blog and Y2K, vape and selfie. Even fracking and omnishambles don’t seem so bad in retrospect.

The Oxford dictionary tried to keep it light while simultaneously showcasing its downness-with-the-kids, when it chose rizz as its WOTY. Not the gummy paper rectangle in which one rolls one’s weed, but the rizz in charisma. 

We’re desperate for a buzzword that doesn’t resonate negatively; we are clutching at straws here. Rizz? Who even says that? Oh. Fifty billion Gen Zs on TikTok. My bad.

Have you got your own personal word to sum up the year? 

Here’s mine - it’s got nothing to do with AI, or charisma, or Taylor Swift (Swiftie was another contender for WOTY). 

No, it’s something the far less sexy but a lot more authentic – it’s overwhelm. Noun, verb, adjective, the lot. I am, it is, we are. 

It’s the word I hear falling from the mouths of people – women – again and again. We drink coffee and whisper to each other about how overwhelmed we feel. Hollowed out. 

Is it the time of year? The time of life? Or did the dictionaries miss a trick with their choice of word, when really the word which best reflects 2023 is shitstorm? 

I fear it may be so. Happy Christmas, authentic hallucinations.