It wasn’t clear to me until I heard on a podcast that, every year, linguistic institutions and dictionaries usually select their word of the year. If I’m late for this dance, I apologize in advance, but as my mom says, “better late than never.”
And I have always liked the exercise of understanding words etymologically. I use it a lot for writings or presentations, because with the simple fact of understanding the history of a word, many things become clear. For example, did you know that “business” means “not leisure”? Or that “computer” literally translates as “doing math.”
But returning to the words of the year, new to me as you know, I want to highlight three that caught my attention out of the many that I discovered, because yes, the “word of the year” became a small “rabbit-hole” of end of the year.
Manifestthe word chosen by the Cambridge dictionary, transcended the field of self-help in 2024 to become a cultural phenomenon, especially on social networks. It comes from Latin manifestowhich means evident or clearbut its current popularity lies in the idea of “making something happen by internalizing or visualizing it.”
Polarization It was the word of the year according to the Oxford English Dictionary, chosen to reflect the growing division and extremism in various areas of society, especially in the political context. And it is increasingly felt that discussions occur only to reaffirm extremes instead of finding common ground. There were plenty of cases last year, and unfortunately, dictatorships too.
Brain-rot (mental rot), chosen by Oxford. A word that is born from that Anglo-Saxon ability to make a script capable of joining two words and turning them into a single term. And although its meaning does not seem to need explanation, it specifically refers to the intellectual deterioration that can occur from consuming too much low-quality content online, mainly on social networks.
For me, these three words –manifest, polarization and mental rot– They offer a good portrait of the current moment we are going through as a society. We live in an era marked by a paradox: unlimited access to information coexists with a profound disconnection that fuels divisions and fosters an intellectual decline that is no longer individual, but a collective problem.
A paradox that has also led us to believe, mistakenly, that the simple act of imagining or wishing can solve everything. And believe me, I use the power of manifestation a lot in my life, and I also read tarot, but I am very clear that it is not enough to want something to obtain it; You have to combine intention with action, desire with discipline, and dreams with planning. Only then, the Universe (I told you I’m on this wavelength) stops being a spectator and becomes a catalyst.
As a Japanese proverb I came across says: “Vision without action is a dream; “action without vision is a nightmare.”
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