The silly season is traditionally accompanied by an avalanche of evaluations of what the past year has brought: top 10s, hot-not listicles, man/woman/cocktail/cleaning hack of the year … It’s a relief and an irritant when institutions produce forgettable victors.
Words of the Year for 2024 were particularly abstruse. For all the boomers who had to have Collins Dictionary’s “brat” explained to them (and remained agreeably uncomprehending) there was a corresponding mob of folk who fancy themselves at Scrabble only to be stumped by the Economist’s “kakistocracy”.
Readers are unlikely to die wondering, but brat was coined by pop artist Charli XCX to celebrate happy-go-lucky women too busy enjoying life to necessarily brush their hair or make their beds, and kakistocracy means governance by the very best. Just kidding. It means the opposite.
Clearly at a loss, Oxford University Press chose “brain rot” – a term lately used for the effect of online information overload, but otherwise hardly a novel coinage.
These bons mots will likely meet the fate of previous years’ winners, dating anyone who uses them and dwindling to obscure trivia quiz questions. “Riz” – short for charisma – was an It word of 2023 but has all but disappeared from its original youth habitat because, like “brat”, it is designed by its inventors to self-destruct.
The words each successive young generation coins to exclude and preferably annoy their parents evaporate or tarnish to cringeworthiness the minute anyone outside that demographic starts using them. Occasionally, a cancelled word slips through, as with “cool”, coined in the 50s/60s. It’s now so ubiquitous it’s no longer itself cool.
As for kakistocracy, beyond Scrabble, it will only be used by the extremely pretentious – with no offence intended to the sublime Economist, which has struggled with the re-election of Donald Trump and seems to have emitted this word as a cry for help.
Refreshingly, a December auction in New York provided a hitherto unknown old listicle that sparked some surprisingly modern reflection among its readers: a “Things I hate” list, typed and hand amended by the pioneering crime fiction writer Raymond Chandler.
His novels and screenplay collaborations last century made him a literary and Hollywood deity. “Cool” barely begins to do justice to The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, The Blue Dahlia, Strangers on a Train and Double Indemnity.
Though a depressive and alcoholic, he remains an inspirational wordsmith. Even his black list, among personal documents auctioned, showed nuanced curmudgeonliness, specially towards the publishing and cinema realms he bestrode. He hated actors: “English caricatures of Americans” and “American caricatures of Englishmen”. He had conflicted emotions on poverty. He hated giving money to “panhandlers” because he felt “stung”, but hated not giving them money because he felt “cheap”.
Movies about people who couldn’t make any money annoyed him, as did stories of “ruttish” (lustful) rural dwellers – suggesting he did not find the Great Depression ‒ a big preoccupation of Hollywood ‒ a fit source of entertainment. Nor did he relish its sexy noir classics like The Postman Always Rings Twice. But he also hated “novels about people who make a lot of money”.
Perhaps his most resonant pen-piercings came when he fleshed out his dislike of “arty people” and “novels about arty people”: “Very short stories that are written as if they meant a hell of a lot, but which don’t mean a goddamn thing that you don’t put into them yourself”, and “People who talk as if they can’t imagine anyone not listening to them.”
What response would an observer of Chandler’s arch, worldly sensibility have to brat-dom and brain rot, let alone his country’s current kakistocracy? The very shortest of goodbyes.
