Every year the same pantomime repeats: a handful of self-appointed language guardians announce their “Words of the Year” and the media treats it like a national emergency. This season’s parade of picks — Merriam‑Webster’s “slop” (announced December 14, 2025), Oxford’s “rage bait” (December 1, 2025), Dictionary.com’s baffling choice of “67” (October 28, 2025), and Collins’s “vibe coding” (November 6, 2025) — tells you everything you need to know about the priorities of our cultural elite. Instead of celebrating strength, work, and family, they keep applauding either trendy nonsense or virtue-signaling shorthand.
Merriam‑Webster’s pick, “slop,” is at least honest: it names the flood of low-quality, AI-produced garbage swamping our screens. But celebrating the word without attacking the underlying problem is performative; the real scandal is that media outlets and Silicon Valley built the algorithmic machines that churn out slop and then act surprised. Conservatives should call out both the tech overlap and the cultural institutions that normalize replacing craftsmanship with machine-made junk.
Oxford’s choice of “rage bait” is a lecture from the very people who profit off outrage while pretending to lament it. The term accurately describes the attention economy’s worst instincts — content designed to provoke, inflame, and polarize — yet the remedy proposed by the same establishment is always more censorship or algorithmic tinkering, not a revival of personal responsibility and civic virtue. If we’re serious about restoring public discourse, we should insist platforms stop rewarding rage and start rewarding reason.
Dictionary.com’s elevation of “67” into Word of the Year is emblematic of the intellectual drift: celebrating hollow, meaningless slang as if it were cultural progress. A number with no stable definition becoming a linguistic trophy is a reminder that juvenile online trends are being institutionalized while stable institutions like families and churches are left to crumble. Conservatives understand that language reflects moral order, and when words lose meaning it’s often because society has abandoned the virtues that gave them substance.
Collins’s “vibe coding” pick — a sign that even coding is now framed as an affective, AI-driven process — should alarm anyone who prizes human skill and apprenticeship. Turning craft into a mood ring for machines accelerates the erosion of expertise and hands more control to the very firms who outsource judgment to black‑box systems. The proper conservative response is to champion education, competence, and standards that resist the seduction of convenience offered by these supposedly inevitable tech trends.
Taken together, these choices from major lexicons are a map of a civilization distracted: exhausted by algorithmic slop, manipulated by rage, and enthralled to ephemeral slang and tech-driven shortcuts. Rather than bowing to the lexicographers’ narrative, patriotic Americans should reclaim language as an expression of shared reality — demanding that our leaders, media, and tech platforms prioritize truth, work, and family over clicks and cultural theatre. The next time a “Word of the Year” is unveiled, we should ask not who made it fashionable but what it reveals about the values we’ve lost and the ones we must fight to restore.
