Let’s begin the year by summarising the ‘Words of the Year’ chosen by the world’s great dictionaries to represent last year. See if you can detect a trend. Our own Macquarie Dictionary chose ‘AI slop’, presciently, because hot on their heels, the great Merriam-Webster, chose ‘slop’. By this they meant ‘digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence’. When two major dictionaries express scepticism over the flood of dubious rubbish pumped out by Artificial Stupidity (under its nom de plume of Artificial Intelligence), we should pay attention.

Dictionary.com had already picked ‘6-7’ (pronounced ‘six-seven’) as their WOTY. This is ubiquitous among the young (and dumb politicians trying to sound trendy). The foolish among us say repeatedly, ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’ It does. And I am here to explain. The words should be accompanied by a gesture of holding out both hands and moving them slightly up and down, like a set of scales because, to the young, ‘6-7’ means ‘not great but not too bad, so-so’. It comes from US basketball player LeMello Ball, who is flashy and popular but whose skills are ‘so-so’ (he is no Michael Jordan). He became famous through a rap song by Skrilla, which reveals his height, 6’7”. So, that’s what it means and where it comes from.

The Oxford’s WOTY is ‘rage bait’, a variation on the earlier ‘clickbait’; the practice of winning as many clicks by irritating people as by intriguing or pleasing them. At the Other Place (Cambridge), they settled on the much older word, ‘parasocial’. It labels those people who imagine they have a personal relationship with celebrities they have only ever seen on the screen. ‘Parasocial’ relationships can lead them to become ‘toxic fans’ or even stalkers.

Finally, the Collins Dictionary lexicographers went with ‘vibe coding’, a bit of software that allows those us who can’t code to give instructions in English, which the program translates into machine code.

See the pattern? The trend is trendiness. Rather than choosing a word that captures the headlines or the heartbeat of the year, the dictionaries are competing to be at the cutting edge of trendiness with the ‘yoof’ crowd. If they had followed public debate, the dominant word in America has been ‘tariff’, and for the rest of the world, ‘antisemitism’ is what has worried us the most. But those words are not cool or trendy.

So, I might as well fall into the same pattern and announce my personal choice for the Word of the Year is ‘stupidogenic’. ‘Obesogenic’ describes a society (such as America) where the food is full of fat and the servings are always too large, breeding obesity. ‘Stupidogenic’ is the mental equivalent; a society that encourages citizens to shut down their brains and stop thinking, in which too many people discard books, newspapers and magazines in favour of smartphones, in which people only visit websites or social media sites where everyone agrees with them, so their thinking is never challenged. IQs rose generally throughout the West during the 20th century. IQs are now starting to fall. That’s the evidence for our ‘stupidogenic’ society. So far, this word is not found in any major dictionary. It is not even in the hyper-hip online Urban Dictionary, so we are way ahead of the curve! British journalist Richard Godwin alerted me to the word family of ‘stupidogenesis’. These days, he points out, we let computers do the work our brains did in days gone by. We used to know how to research (even visit a library to consult a large selection of reference books). These days, we Google it! We don’t even use our brains to read maps, our GPS does it. According to the UK’s National Literacy Trust, one third of British adults have given up reading books. The Economist reported that the sentences in best-sellers are getting shorter. The researchers at MIT call it ‘cognitive offloading’. And as the Macquarie Dictionary and Merriam-Webster noted, AI turns writing into ‘slop’. What sort of leaders will a ‘stupidogenic’ society elect? I suspect this new word is the most important word I have written about in the past 12 months. Think about it and I’m sure you’ll agree.