A Bizarrely Online Word of the Year
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For the second consecutive time, the Oxford English Dictionary crowned an internet-slang term its word of the year. This year’s choice—rizz—is meaningful only to the extent that it reminds us of the dictionary’s role as a responsive, living object.
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‘Here Lies Rizz’
The reason I know what means is so inane, it’s not even worth getting into. It involves a TikTok video, and a, which refers to someone’s ability to flirt by being charismatic, was never a word I thought all that much about. But the fact that it was just crowned the word of the year by the is a reminder that a dictionary is a dynamic corpus, evolving right alongside language and capable of responding even to internet phenomena that are just entering the mainstream.
