Cancelled for sadfishing: the top 10 words of 2019

The year 2019 might still have some surprises in store for us – Donald Trump is yet to ask the Queen if she has any dirt on Joe Biden – but we know the general shape of it: global chaos, lies and Love Island. We also know many of its words. We are approaching the moment when the great dictionaries pick those that sum up our times, following on from last year’s “toxic” (Oxford English Dictionary), “justice” (Merriam Webster) “single use” (Collins) and “me too” (Macquarie). The words might not have been coined in 2019, but will have acquired new meaning, risen to prominence, or somehow distil our preoccupations. In advance of the lexicographers’ big reveal, here are my top 10 candidates.

People

A pretty ordinary word – and one with a long history (its origins are murky once you get past Latin, where populus meant a community or nation). But the way the idea of “the people” has been used over the past year, often cynically, makes it thoroughly contemporary. Supporters of Brexit constantly invoke the “will” of the people, likening the nation to an individual with desires and motives. Their opponents agitate for a “people’s vote”. Trump makes it a proper noun: “I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People.” Back in Britain we nervously await a “people versus parliament” election, with Boris Johnson eager to paint MPs who oppose his strategy as anti-democrats at odds with the popular mood.

Prorogue

Like one of the aged vellum documents stowed in parliament’s Victoria tower, this word was unfurled in August to widespread incomprehension. But it is an important part of the creaking apparatus of the British constitution and refers to the act of ending a parliamentary session. It comes from the Latin verb to extend and contains the element rogare (to ask). As it turned out, there wasn’t much asking involved – Johnson’s government, in the vampiric form of Jacob Rees-Mogg, told the Queen that parliament needed to be suspended and she complied. But, as the supreme court concluded, this instruction was unlawful. As MPs re-entered the chamber on 25 September, the only trace of the prorogation was the imprint of its lugubrious syllables in our minds.

Femtech

Startup culture hasn’t always seemed like the most welcoming place for women, so the idea of femtech might seem like a breath of fresh air. Investment in digital technology designed to improve women’s health and wellbeing – like Bluetooth enabled pelvic-floor training devices or fertility apps – has been steadily building. In the first quarter of 2019, $241m (£190m) was ploughed into femtech companies, leading some to predict the sector’s first billion-dollar year. But the term isn’t without controversy. “When it’s about men and men’s health, it’s not mentech, right?” one analyst recently told the BBC. “Welcome to the world of 21st-century technological advancements, where brand new innovations give us the chance to … create exactly the same stupid sexist divides all over again,” wrote Quartz’s Olivia Goldhill. It’s a good question: why are products aimed at half the population deemed niche?

Sadfishing

One of those rare words whose origin can be precisely pinpointed to an opinion piece – in Metro in January. “Sadfishing,” wrote Rebecca Reid, “is when someone uses their emotional problems to hook an audience on the internet”. She was attacking an Instagram post by Kris Jenner that teased followers with the promise of a confession by her daughter Kendall about some personal trauma: in fact, it was a marketing campaign for a skincare range. Sadfishing roared back into the news in September after a report commissioned by British headteachers suggested children who posted about their problems on social media were having the word thrown at them by bullies. It takes its place next to a series of terms relating to online behaviour that uses the suffix “fishing”, including blackfishing and catfishing.

Opioid

Synthetic molecules that mimic the effects of natural opiates – chemicals derived from the opium poppy – are called opioids and they include now-familiar names such as oxycodone and fentanyl. They can be 100 times stronger than morphine and have rarely been out of the news in 2019 because of an explosion in the number of people killed by them, particularly in the US. Fatal overdoses now occur at a rate of 130 a day, making the “opioid crisis” or “opioid epidemic” America’s great contemporary public health crisis. It has also led to the fall of one of its richest families – the Sacklers, whose company Purdue Pharma produced OxyContin. Use of the search term “opioid” spiked in August, when Purdue agreed to settle lawsuits against it to the tune of $10-$12bn.

Pronoun

Previously an innocuous piece of linguistic plumbing, the pronoun – a grammatical device used to refer back to a noun you have already mentioned – is having a moment. The word itself has become a signifier of the new gender politics: it is now not unusual to see the note “pronouns: he/him” or “she/her” alongside job title and address at the end of emails or on social media profiles. In September, the singer Sam Smith told his Instagram followers “My pronouns are they/them”, adding: “After a lifetime of being at war with my gender, I’ve decided to embrace myself for who I am, inside and out.” The use of “they” to refer to a singular noun, although it has a long history, has traditionally been discouraged by grammarians. The most recent edition of the famed Chicago Manual of Style, however, says: “When referring specifically to a person who does not identify with a gender-specific pronoun ... they and its forms are often preferred.”

Woke

Woke, meaning “well-informed”, first appeared in print in a glossary of “words you might hear in Harlem” in 1962. It finally entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, with the definition “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice”. So what makes it a potential word of the year 2019? Put simply, woke has gone mainstream and in doing so has been subject to a bizarre transformation. At the end of 2018, African American broadcaster Sam Sanders made a plea “to put woke to sleep”. He argued that any authenticity it once had was being lost due to overuse by white liberals, leading to its co-option by businesses keen to burnish their progressive credentials – so-called “wokewashing” – and ultimately to a backlash. A new ironic use of woke has exploded and two books published this year exemplify the boomerang effect: Woke by comedian Andrew Doyle, writing as the PC parody Titania McGrath and Anti-Woke by professional contrarian Brendan O’Neill. Woke is dead; “woke” is alive and kicking.

Nanoinfluencer

Over the past few years a new economy has sprung up, its workers “relatable” personalities who are ostensibly letting you peek into their private lives, its products whatever they pose with on Instagram. It has proved fertile ground for new words, including “influencer” for the people involved and “sponcon”, for sponsored content they post (a label seen more frequently since watchdogs cracked down on stealth ads in 2017). Subcategories of influencer have been delineated: the “unfluencer”, the “outfluencer” the “microinfluencer”. The latest is nanoinfluencer – someone who may have only a thousand or so followers. They are supposed to be like you and me (and their endorsements come cheap for the brands that target them). As the digital economy penetrates deeper, some people you know might already fall into this category: maybe next year, you will too.

Cancelled

The fear that most preoccupies modern-day public figures is that of cancellation: being dumped in the basket of deplorables after a trial by a jury of millions of strangers. Notable cancellees this year included the beauty YouTuber James Charles, whose followers turned against him for reasons too arcane for most outsiders to understand, and Justin Trudeau, whose offences in blackface are a bit easier to discern. Redemption can only be achieved through (ideally multiple rounds of) rehab, as satirised by Lolly Adefope in this year’s BBC comedy short Sorry, in which an imperious actress on the brink of superstardom is felled by a 12-year-old tweet. If you are concerned about your own status, a new website, Am I Cancelled?, uses an algorithm to determine whether you are still fit to show your face on social media.

Crisis

Every age has predicted that the end of the world is nigh. But it increasingly feels as though inhabitants of early-21st century Earth may be on to something. From the environmental to the political and the economic, our times are defined by a worsening of conditions to the point of emergency. This year Britain and the US’s serial constitutional crises have dominated the news, but a far bigger catastrophe, the climate crisis, has begun to seem more and more real, too. In May, the Guardian changed the language it uses to describe the situation, preferring climate crisis or breakdown to the less-urgent seeming climate change. In some of its earliest-recorded uses, the word referred to a “turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death”. It remains to be seen what course our own crisis will take.

David Shariatmadari is the author of Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language