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Though word of the year pronouncements are now as much a part of the Christmas season as advent calendars and mince pies, they’re a relatively recent phenomenon. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the first such judgment was issued by the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (Association for the German Language) in 1971. And that first word of the year was aufmüpfig, meaning, since you asked, ‘rebellious or insubordinate’, chosen to reflect the counterculture and student revolts of the time.

The English-speaking world didn’t get in on the act until 1990, when the American Dialect Society chose bushlips, derived from George HW Bush infamous pledge: ‘Read my lips: no new taxes’. Using bushlips may have been all the rage back in the Nineties, but seems to have long since fallen from common usage.

The standard English language dictionaries — Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster — waited until the new millennium before adopting the annual practice. So which words did they choose in 2025? Oxford Dictionaries went for rage bait, defined as ‘online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account’.

As a confirmed pedant, I have to point out this is actually two words, But still, why rage bait? The Oxford website says that:

The choice of Cambridge Dictionaries was parasocial, defined as: ‘involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence’. The Cambridge team explained their choice as follows:

Crossing the pond, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was slop, defined as: ‘digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.’ Their reasoning for this choice was as follows:

As an aside, my favourite writer on contemporary English is the Spectator’s Dot Wordsworth. Though she used to chose a word of the year, she has discontinued the practice in recent years. The Economist, another of my regular reads, started picking a word of the year in, I think, 2015. This year it emulated Merriam-Webster and chose slop, justifying the choice as follows:

All of these choices are examples of one of the most interesting aspects of contemporary English usage: the gradual shift from mainstream media to social media as the driver of how words come into vogue, and how their meanings and connotations change.

[Oxford English Dictionary image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.]

This terrific sculpture of the Green Man by Toin Adams stands in a cramped space in the Custard Factory in Digbeth, Birmingham. The site was once home to Alfred Bird & Sons Ltd, manufacturers of the famed Bird’s Custard Powder, and is now an arts, office, and retail location. This post-industrial area of the city is an unlikely spot for a personification of nature and the life force. But the Green Man, as nature symbol and ostensibly folkloric figure, has a contested and unresolved history. The phrase itself was coined only in the 1930s to refer to those heads sprouting and disgorging vegetation, which can be found in many English cathedrals and churches.

Several attempts have been made to link the Green Men of ecclesiastical decoration with the Jack-in-the-Green folk custom, the Greek god Dionysus, and even the Green Knight of the Sir Gawain poem. The theory is that all these forms being examples of a supposed single and ancient nature spirit. But these conjectures are thin and unconvincing. The earliest foliate heads in English churches date from the Norman period, the earliest reference to the Jack-in-the-Green is late eighteenth century and, as far as I know, there are no representations of the Green Man in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon artefacts. There are also no myths or legends mentioning such a figure. If the Green Man really is an ancient nature spirit, then the medieval heads have been grafted onto the rootstock.

What’s perhaps more interesting is the meaning and resonance of the Green Man in contemporary culture. The notion of a male, and perhaps more active, counterpart to Mother Nature has grown in popularity at the same time as environmental and ecological concerns have become more pressing, Even the Green Man pub signs that once displayed foresters have been replaced with pictures of foliate heads. In his book Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth, William Anderson used Carl Jung’s concepts of compensation and archetypes to argue that ‘the Green Man is rising up into our present awareness in order to counterbalance a lack in our attitude to Nature’. In other words, the symbol of the Green Man gathers power and significance as our trashing of the planet increases. I think there’s something to that. What could be better than a mythical figure without a constraining myth or genealogy for modern civilization to project its anxieties about the natural world onto?

Towards the end of the Breakdown era, the catafalques of local chieftains became grander and more permanent. This example, discovered in what was once the Digbeth district of Birmingham, commemorates Sandra Zeinab O’Malley al-Brum, leader of the belligerent and short-lived Warks-Motorway Caliphate. The automobile played an obscure but significant role in the Caliphate’s rituals, and may have symbolised either the fall of industrial civilization or the putative riches of the world to come. It is thought that O’Malley al-Brum died in the Battle of Newport Pagnell, a decisive defeat for the Caliphate. Local legend has it that her sword, adorned with a Mercedes badge, was cast by her serving men into the Gas Street basin. The legend claims that whoever finds it will lead a revival of the Caliphate.

[Photograph taken in Digbeth, Birmingham.]

James Murray, the primary editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary, sent and received so much mail while he was compiling the dictionary that the Post Office installed a post box outside his house.