2025 Word of the Year: Slop
Plus ‘gerrymander’, ‘touch grass’, ‘performative’, and other words that defined the year
Tag: words
Fossil Words
WTW for a word that is almost exclusively only used in a set phrase? For example, the word “figment” in the phrase “a figment of your imagination”.
byu/DracoOccisor inwhatstheword
Bayoris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word
DracoOccisor
Solved
aj-uk
I hope you feel gruntled.
Reapr
and whelmed
From wikipedia:
“Born fossils”
These words were formed from other languages, by elision, or by mincing of other fixed phrases.caboodle, as in “kit and caboodle” (evolved from “kit and boodle”, itself a fixed phrase borrowed as a unit from Dutch kitte en boedel)
druthers, as in “if I had my druthers…” (formed by elision from “would rather”[11] and never occurring outside this phrase to begin with)
tarnation, as in “what in tarnation…?” (evolved in the context of fixed phrases formed by mincing of previously fixed phrases that include the term “damnation”)
nother, as in “a whole nother…” (fixed phrase formed by rebracketing another as a nother, then inserting whole for emphasis; almost never occurs outside this phrase)
Wordle – How To Play, Where To Play, Example of play
Goal -> Figure out the word
You get 6 tries
Grey – Letter not in word
Yellow – Letter in word but in wrong place
Green – Letter is where it should be
Play here:
https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
Anamnesis
In philosophy, anamnesis (/ˌænæmˈniːsɪs/; Ancient Greek: ἀνάμνησις) is a concept in Plato’s epistemological and psychological theory that he develops in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo, and alludes to in his Phaedrus.
It is the idea that humans possess knowledge from past incarnations and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge within us.
via Wikipedia
Phaneron
By the phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not. If you ask present when, and to whose mind, I reply that I leave these questions unanswered, never having entertained a doubt that those features of the phaneron that I have found in my mind are present at all times and to all minds. So far as I have developed this science of phaneroscopy, it is occupied with the formal elements of the phaneron.
– Charles Sanders Pierce