Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year goes ‘goblin mode’

NEW YORK: A year ago, the lexicographic grandees at Oxford Languages dutifully stuck out their arms and chose “vax” as the 2021 Word of the Year. But this year, the venerable publisher behind the Oxford English Dictionary has — like the rest of us, apparently — gone full goblin mode. “Goblin mode” — a slang term referring to “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations” — hasbeen named Oxford’s 2022 Word of the Year. Yes, you read that right. After a landslide online popular vote, an in-joke that surged to prominence thanks to a viral tweet involving an actress, arapper and a doctored headline has been named 2022’s One Word to Rule Them All.
“New words catch on when they capture our imagination, or fill a hole with a word for a concept we need to express,” Katherine Connor Martin, product director at Oxford Languages, said in a telephone interview. “What ‘goblin mode’ tells me is it resonated with the feeling that the pandemic is over, but we’re still grappling with it. Do we want to go back to the notions of respectability of the pre-pandemic world?”
The Word of the Year is based on usage evidence drawn from Oxford’s continually updated corpus of more than 19 billion words, gathered from news sources across the English-speaking world. Normally, Oxford’s lexicographers assemble a list of words that had a statistically relevant surge, then choose one. This year, they took a more populist approach, announcing a shortlist of three — “goblin mode,” “#IStandWith” and “metaverse” — and then throwing it to a two-week online public vote. The inclusion of “goblin mode” drew some consternation, as the Not Very Online went scrambling to Google. But for some, it was the clear winner. In a passionate appeal, website PC Gamer urged people to “put asideour petty differences and vote for ‘goblin mode,’” if only to thwart the milquetoast-y “#IStandWith” and the downright evil “metaverse. ” The internet obeyed, delivering 93% of the more than 340,000 votes cast to “goblin mode. ” “Metaverse” was the runner-up, with 4%. The precise origins of “goblin mode” are murky. It popped up on Twitter as early as 2009, according to Oxford, but it went viral last spring, thanks to a satirical tweet featuring a fake news headline that quoted actress Julia Fox saying that she and Kanye West broke up because he didn’t like it when she “went goblin mode. ” (Fox later posted a denial on Instagram: Just for the record, I have never used the phrase ‘goblin mode. )
The phrase, Martin said, reflects the influence of the language of gaming. “Goblin mode” may be new, but “beast mode,” she said, goes back farther, with some tracing it to the 1988 Sega video game Altered Beast.