This week: Words of the year are all the rage. What’s yours? I’ll tell you mine and why I chose it and…that’s it. That’s the issue. Let’s get into it.
Hello Again
The past couple of weeks have seen all the big dictionaries (and a few small ones) trot out their words of the year. Merriam-Webster has gaslighting, the OED has goblin mode, and both the Australian National University and the Macquarie Dictionary have gone for the color teal as their word of the year. Which is fine. Cool, even. But there has already been a ton of commentary1 about it, so I'm not going to rehash any of that here. Instead, I'd rather talk about your word of the year. So let's do that.
First some parameters: when we talk about your word of the year, what do we mean? Is it the word you used the most2? Or is it the word that was most meaningful to you? And, if that's the case, in what way(s) was/is it meaningful? Did someone teach it to you in a specific context? Did you come across it in a rambling, too-wordy newsletter about etymology3?
Maybe it wasn't a new word at all. Maybe it's an old favorite that has become relevant again because of changes in your life. Maybe it's a combination of the two - it's a word you used to use all the time but slowly forgot about and then, suddenly, like a two a.m. phone call from your ex, it's back in your life whether you like it or not.
The point is, without your personal, individual context, the word of the year means nothing.
Merhaba. That's my word of the year. It means "hello" in Turkish and is pronounced like "mer-aba," to my ears at least.
Now, as to why that's my word of the year, that's a little bit of a story. Last February (I think) SubStack held a kind of bootcamp for writers. We got put into groups with people we had never met before, were given tasks to complete and discuss, and generally give and receive feedback on our newsletters. I was fortunate enough to get put into a group with some really lovely people with whom I still have regular discussions4. It has been the single biggest and most meaningful change in my public life this year and I'm grateful for the experience and for the friends I've made. But none of them are Turkish nor live in Turkiye.
However, fast forward a few months and I had gotten into Learned Volume 5's theme - words I heard in the world that I didn't know. One of them was a Turkish word for the sleeve that goes around your paper coffee cup. And so, in May, I dedicated an issue of Learned to the word zarf and much fun was had.
Fast forward another few weeks and I wrote about a timely political issue, namely that the countries of Turkey and Ukraine wanted to have the spellings of some names modernized with respect to their national languages and emergent cultures. Thus, Turkey became Turkiye and Ukraine's city of Kiev became Kyiv. Through these two posts, I had become more aware of Turkish as a language and culture than I ever had been before.
So, after a few more months had passed, Matthias (my friend and member of my SubStack writing group) and I decided to try doing a language challenge (Part 1, Part 2). Each of us would choose a language from Wikipedia's list of the most common languages in the world and give the other person clues as to which language it was. So, which language did I pick? Turkish.
I had an absolute blast doing the challenge with Matthias. We each posted a video on our site and that was that. Only, I decided I really liked the sound of Turkish and I had forgotten, almost, how much fun it could be to just pick a language and study it for no other reason than it was interesting. So I kept at it. Not in any real serious, I've-got-to-know-every-word-within-six-weeks-internet-challenge way, just in a fun, casual, I've-got-twenty-minutes-and-there's-a-new-YouTube-video-out kind of way.
And so, my word of the year is one is the first Turkish word I learned, merhaba. I had not known it prior to this year; it's also not a word that, by itself, means much to me. Rather it is emblematic of a set of circumstances and sequences that were unexpected and un-looked for but nevertheless wholly welcome and thoroughly appreciated.
Merhaba, hello.
Now, what's your word?
Down the Rabbit Hole
Every year, writer Tom Whitwell does a list of 52 Things he has learned during the past year. It is always a worthwhile and informative read and I learn something every year. More than that, I keep it bookmarked and refer back to it throughout the year, using it as a source of inspiration whenever I get stuck. Here are links to the past few years:
Down the Rabbit Hole
Since we're looking back at the year we've just had, why not go back to April, when I started Volume 5 of Learned. The working title for this volume has been "Say It Again But Slowly" and it began as words I came across that I didn't know. As haughty as that my sound, my idea was to gather up some of these rarer or unusual words and open a discussion about them. It's been fairly successful, limited only by the amount of time I have had in which to do research. So, without any further ado, here's Learned, Volume 5, Issue 1, Peripatetic Mix-Up.
Not least from fellow SubStackers Rebecca at Everybody Talks and Heddwen at English in Progress, both of which I can heartily recommend.
If you're an English speaker, it's the. Maybe a.
Hi. Thank you so much for reading. Your support means everything.
Shoutout to The News!
Goodness, I never thought about applying "word of the year" to my own life and now I'm stumped! I'll have to give this one some more thought, but I'll tentatively say "connection" -- this year had a lot of meaningful connection w/ my students, my community, other writers (yay!), etc. But it's not the most exciting word so I might have to edit this later, ha.
I don't have a habit of reducing my year to a single word but here you go: mine would probably be something like "discovery" because of how much I discovered this year through my conversations with you and the rest of The News, the lesser known languages I've researched, and my first time in South East Asia.
On another note, glad to hear you kept learning Turkish! 👍