Word(s) of the year for 2024

As someone who loves the alphabet and who enjoys tossing about its 26 letters and forming them into words and sentences that hopefully resonate with readers, these past months have moved me from Charlie Brown’s repeated exclamation of “AAUGH!” to a word that I find myself repeating with equal frequency: kakistocracy, which I first read about in an article in The Guardian a number of weeks ago.

As I unearthed its origins, I was surprised to learn not only of its existence, but of the fact that its use in describing the President-elect’s cabinet picks is not the first time that the word has been employed to describe “government by the worst.”

As I learned that former U. S. Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur also popularized the term, a Turkish proverb came to mind: “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” And then the term “a three-ring circus” swirled in my mind, along with visions of maddening barkers along a midway luring the gullible into halls of mirrors and shows of incredulity. 

As Matthew Cantor reported in The Guardian, the term has been around since at least 1644. That’s not a typo — 1644. One would think that between then and now the word would have met a determined death, albeit a slow one. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The word’s Greek roots are borderline crass, at best: the Greek kakistos (worst) which might possibly come from the Proto-Indo-European word kakka (to defecate). And as unsettling as it may seem, this knowledge helped me to understand better what was unfolding with such rapidity, as I wondered how quickly we might be able to put the word’s obvious destruction back where it belongs: in the annals of history.

Moving on, Oxford’s Word of the Year has recently been revealed as “brain rot.” It’s defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content). In a recent TIME Magazine article, “brain rot” speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life. Social media channels have become the very place said to cause “brain rot,” according to the article’s author, Chad de Guzman. 

And Cambridge’s word of the year was “manifest,” which means “to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.” There is no scientific evidence to support this theory.

As each of these “words of the year” brings reflection and understanding and yes, an unease about them, I’m going to remain loyal to Charlie Brown, as I encapsulate all my thoughts into that one word that seems to make it all more than clear: “AAUGH!”