What were the words that defined 2019?

‘Come off it,’ said my husband when I told him that upcycling was the word of the year. His response did not chime with the spirit of the Cambridge Dictionary in naming it: ‘We think that our fans resonated with upcycling not as a word in itself but with the positive idea behind it.’

I prefer words in themselves. But what was the dictionary to do? It posts a Word of the Day on Instagram, and upcycling received more ‘likes’ than any other Word of the Day.

Over at Collins Dictionary, they noticed a hundredfold increase in the use of climate strike in 2019, and made it the Collins word of the year. Last year, it had been single-use, an adjective qualifying plastic.

One notices a trend towards environmental terms. It is not that, in unprompted conversation at the Moreton-in-Marsh stop for the 801 bus to Bourton-on-the-Water, climate strikes and upcycling dominate. But such language attracts concentrated usage on social media. I had thought Instagram was for pictures, not words. I was wrong. For all I know, between dance-move videos, TikTok will come up with its own word of the year too.

Words of the year are part of big-business dictionary wars. Respectable newspapers give free publicity to their choices. Some seem feeble. A Collins shortlist candidate was bopo. If you use the word bopo, your interlocutor will say ‘What?’ or ‘Pardon?’ according to how they were brought up. They might think you meant BoJo, a humorous name for Boris Johnson. It also sounds like that earlier flash-in-the-pan fomo. Bopo is a portmanteau word from ‘body positivity’ and fomo is an acronym standing for ‘fear of missing out’.

A couple of years ago, I didn’t even know the meaning of the word voted for by the American Dialect Society: dumpster fire.