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Americans watching the spectacle of “Words of the Year” announcements this season should feel less impressed and more alarmed. What was once a modest linguistic snapshot has become a political and cultural mirror — one that shows elites and tech platforms shaping, celebrating, and even weaponizing language while ordinary people get drowned out. The choices reveal not just trends in speech but the priorities of those who set cultural agendas, and those priorities ought to concern every parent, worker, and patriot.
Merriam‑Webster picked “slop” as its 2025 Word of the Year, a telling admission that our information ecosystem is being flooded with cheap, mass‑produced junk from generative AI and sloppy journalism. There’s something almost comical about a respected dictionary admitting the internet has become a trough of “slop,” but the laugh should be cut short — because this rot corrodes trust, incentives, and the very idea of expertise. If legacy institutions cheerfully label AI garbage with a wink and a shrug, they’re outsourcing judgment and culture to machines and the companies that profit from them.
Oxford’s selection of “rage bait” as its Word of the Year underscores a darker truth: our attention economy is deliberately monetizing outrage and division. Platforms and pundits have built systems that reward the angriest posts, and now the dictionaries are simply cataloging the damage — as if naming the problem counts as fixing it. Conservatives have long warned that algorithmic incentives and a media culture addicted to conflict would hollow out civil discourse; seeing “rage bait” recognized nationally is proof we were right.
If you needed a reminder that elite curators of culture are wildly out of touch, Dictionary.com’s choice of “67” — a meaningless, viral numeric meme — is it. Celebrating a piece of ephemeral teen slang as a defining word of the year is a decision that tells you everything about the priorities of coastal opinionmakers: novelty and virality over substance, chaos over coherence. When institutions start elevating nonsense, it’s no surprise that serious public debate falls into the background and spectacle fills the vacuum.
Other selections from across the lexicographic world — like Cambridge’s “parasocial,” Collins’s “vibe coding,” and the recurring appearance of culture‑war terms like “tradwife” and “gerrymander” — form a picture of a society at war with itself and the ordinary institutions that once held us together. These choices read like a curriculum designed by social‑media managers and progressive academics rather than by communities actually raising kids, running businesses, or defending neighborhoods. Naming trends is one thing; using those names to normalize hollow identities or to legitimize new moral hierarchies is quite another, and conservatives should call that out loud.
This isn’t just about words — it’s about consequences. When definitions drift to the left of common sense and platforms reward spectacle over truth, the result is cultural exhaustion, weakened civic norms, and a generation primed to accept slogans instead of solid institutions. If we want a healthier public square, we must push back: insist on accountability from tech companies, support media that prizes facts over fury, and rebuild culture from the bottom up by championing families, faith, and honest work.
Hardworking Americans shouldn’t cede language, meaning, or values to lexicographers, viral trends, and algorithmic incentives. Call out the nonsense when you see it, teach your children how to think instead of what to think, and refuse to let our common language be hollowed out into a marketplace of outrage and manufactured “slop.” If conservatives fight to restore clarity, truth, and decency in how we speak and what we celebrate, we’ll be doing the real work of saving the country’s soul.
