Word of The Year, Trumpisms & The Milkshake Duck (The Naked City)

‘Word of The Year, Trumpisms & The Milkshake Duck’ is the latest column (December 2, 2024) from Coffin Ed‘s The Naked City column – featured exclusively on City Hub.

These days many people are keen to expand their vocabulary and not just to improve their skills at Scrabble or crosswords. You might not realise it but according to a survey by The Economist in 2013 you probably have a range of 20,000 to 35,000 words as a modern day adult speaker of the English language. More recently an American survey by UPI in 2016 claimed that most US adults have a vocabulary approaching 42,000. Given the garbled monosyllabic nonsense that Donald Trump spruiked during his election campaign, he was obviously not included in that study.

With the sheer number of new words we are exposed to each year it seems somewhat pointless anointing just one as the ‘word of the year’ but that’s what Macquarie and other esteemed dictionaries have been doing for some time now. In 2023 both the Macquarie Dictionary Committee’s and the People’s Choice word of the year was the rather uninspiring ‘cossie livs’, a reference to the cost of living (surprise!) and what the Macca crew described as:

“Although cozzie livs was coined in the UK, it has resonated soundly with Australians, with its -ie suffix and its clipped formation, reminiscent of menty b and locky d. And what could be a more Australian approach to a major social and economic problem than to treat it with a bit of humour and informality?”

For the initiated and those not entirely up on popular street jargon (myself included), ‘menty b’ equates to a mental breakdown and locky d to the Covid lockdowns. You add to your word power everyday!

For 2024, the Macquarie gong has gone to the rather catchy ‘enshittification’, similar to ‘crapification’ and originally coined to describe online products and services that decline in quality. The concept being that initially vendors create good quality offerings to attract users, such as social media sites, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers. Finally they degrade their services to both everyday users and business customers even more, to maximise their own profits. Wow, surely that does not apply to X and Facebook!

Already the word seems to have taken on a much wider meaning, applied to numerous aspects of modern day life where product quality and value along with day to day services have been in a seemingly unstoppable decline. It’s easy to think of the word and immediately associate it with the rise of Trump and his cronies in the US. Maybe when the new regime is twelve months down the track we’ll be talking of ‘ultraenshittification’ – a word unfortunately too long to fit on a normal Scrabble board.’

And speaking of Scrabble you have to hand it to long time Scrabble enthusiast Jimmy Kimmel who has long championed the game on his US tonight show. Some years ago, when Trump was first making his ugly mark on US politics, Kimmel invented the spoof game ‘Scrabull’ where players score points using well known ‘Trumpisms’ found in his tweets and emails. For example, when Trump referred to the ‘the smocking gun’, perhaps he was imagining a gun concealed in a painter’s smock, a possible assassination attempt during a presidential portrait sitting.’

Looking back over the Macquarie Dictionary’s previous words of the year there’s a distinct theme applying to either politics, major events and social issues – often all three combined. For example in 2021 during the Covid pandemic the honour went to the word ‘strollout’, supposedly first coined by ACTU boss Sally McManus to describe delays in the distribution of vaccine.

Whether the word will become imbedded in our vocabulary to be rolled out again in a similar situation remains to be seen.

Likewise ‘milkshake duck’ which was the popular choice in 2017 and is seldom repeated in 2024. The phrase originated from cartoonist Ben Ward and a Twitter post describing an internet sensation of a “lovely duck that drinks milkshakes” who turns out to be a nasty racist. No doubt amusing at the time but unlikely to crop up in a 2024 crossword. Other notable winners include ‘me too’ in 2018, ‘fake news’ in 2016 and ‘shovel ready’ in 2009 – all of which have cemented a certain place in the modern day lexicon.

The good thing about vocabulary is anybody can come up with a word or phrase that might find its way into popular usage. With a federal election looming next year there’s bound to be an abundance of political catchcries and slogans along with the inevitable words that are weaponised. ‘Woke’ has had a good workout in recent years, a favourite barb of the conservatives, and could easily be revived in 2025. The left could respond with a whole series of pejoratives aimed at the Coalitions’ nuclear policy. Equally as obscure as the ‘milkshake duck’ stand by for ‘Zeeky Boogy Doog’ – the fateful words that set off a nuclear explosion in the Demented Cartoon Movie. Word of the year in 2025? Anything is possible!