After choosing “climate emergency”, “lockdown” and “vax” as words of the year in 2019, 2020 and 2021, the editor of the Oxford dictionary announced this Monday (5) the expression that, according to the British group, summarizes the 2022 zeitgeist — and she’s far less noble than her predecessors.
Oxford’s new word of the year is “goblin manner,” a slang term that has been defined by the traditional British dictionary as “a type of behavior that is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, sloppy, or greedy, typically in a manner that rejects social norms or expectations.” .
Very concrete examples captured on social networks or in reports in the British press help to better understand what it is about. According to the Oxford press release, being in “goblin mode” is “waking up at 2am and dragging yourself to the kitchen in nothing but a long T-shirt to have a bizarre snack like crackers with melted cheese” or, in the words of the Oxford newspaper The Guardian, “spending the day in bed binge-watching a series while endlessly surfing social media and devouring a bag of chips, leaving the house in pajamas and socks just to grab a Coke at the bar around the corner”.
“Goblin mode” has emerged as word of the year at a time when, for the first time, the publisher of the Oxford dictionary has run a poll open to the public. Engagement was huge, with more than 300,000 people —93% of the total— voting for this expression. The second and third place were metaverse (metaverse) and #IStandWith (something like #EuApoio).
The literal translation of “modo goblin” into Portuguese would be “modo duende”, but the expression is little known in Brazil. First mentioned on Twitter in 2009, the slang won the social networks of English speakers in February 2022, after false news attributed to celebrity Julia Fox, muse of Kanye West.
“Julia Fox opens up about her ‘difficult’ relationship with Kanye West: ‘He didn’t like it when I went into goblin mode,” read the title of the news, later denied by Fox on his Instagram account.
“Goblin mode” grew in popularity over the next few months as Covid lockdown restrictions eased in many countries and people ventured outside more regularly.
🇧🇷[A expressão] apparently captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to ‘normal life’ or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles displayed on social media”, says the disclosure text of Oxford Languages, responsible for by the dictionary.
“Given the year we’ve just experienced, ‘goblin mode’ resonates with all of us we’re feeling a little overwhelmed at this time. It’s a relief to recognize that we’re not always the idealized ‘selves’ we’re encouraged to feature on our Instagram feeds. and TikTok,” Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, said in the statement.
A testament to this, he said, is the rise of platforms like BeReal, where users share unedited images of themselves, often capturing self-indulgent moments in “goblin mode”.
In a March report on the slang going viral, Guardian tech reporter Kari Paul wrote that “goblin mode” “embraces the comforts of depravity” and has become more popular due to the third year of the pandemic “and fears of the beginning of the Third World War”.
Other well-known dictionaries have released their “words of the year” recently. For the American Merriam-Webster, it is gaslighting, a term described as “psychological manipulation of a person, usually for a long period of time, which causes the victim to question the validity of his own thoughts”.
The Collins dictionary chose “permacrisis” as the word for 2022 — the term describes the feeling of living in a prolonged period of instability and insecurity, explains the publisher.
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