I used to worry about being woefully out of touch.<\/p>\n
But, with the release of Dictionary.com’s, and Cambridge’s words of the year, I am starting to view it more as being blissfully out of touch.<\/p>\n
In fact, this year I was not completely blindsided like I was last year with Oxford’s ‘brain rot.’<\/p>\n
I had heard the term 6-7 by virtue of living with teenagers. Dictionary.com has been the brunt of a lot of jokes for choosing a word that it says cannot be defined.<\/p>\n
Really, Dictionary.com? You literally have one job.<\/p>\n
But that seems to be the whole point of 6-7. It is an absurd interjection that appears to be used primarily to frustrate adults and is often accompanied by a juggling motion with the hands.<\/p>\n
I think I’ll go back to being blissfully out of touch.<\/p>\n
Cambridge’s choice is kind of disturbing.<\/p>\n
Parasocial is defined as a one-sided relationship with another person (often a celebrity) or a fictional character in which a person feels an intimate connection to someone they have never met (or something they can never meet).<\/p>\n
Um, delusional much?<\/p>\n
This term has actually been used in academia for decades. It was coined by two American sociologists to describe the “illusion of intimacy” some viewers felt with television personalities during the burgeoning of that world-changing technology in the 1950s.<\/p>\n
It came into popular use over the past year with the burgeoning of another technology, artificial intelligence, specifically AI companions.<\/p>\n
Sorry, that’s just really creepy. Now I really want to be blissfully out of touch.<\/p>\n
It has also been linked to the Taylor Swift phenomenon, although she is certainly not the first singer to inspire stalkers.<\/p>\n
Normally, I wait for Oxford (arguably the definitive definer of words) to release its word of the year to write this column, but I decided to devote another column to that once it is chosen.<\/p>\n
Oxford’s short list includes aura farming (nonsense), biohack (silly), and rage bait (disturbingly relevant).<\/p>\n
Voting ends today. I voted for rage bait.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thom ponders the 2025 Dictionary.com and Cambridge words of the year <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":160762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n