By Julie Reardon

Things are really quiet here in Hunt Country during the month of January so I thought maybe some of this useless information might be entertaining for you to ponder during the upcoming winter days.

Unless you’re younger, an influencer and on social media a lot, you might not know what are considered the current cool new words and phrases and the ones that are so yesterday. The beginning of a brand new year is a good time to learn what words and phrases someone cooler than you decided were winners and losers. Many of us find it entertaining to learn new words or enjoy the picks and if you find any you like, incorporate them into your vocabulary and writing. Some years the picks—usually done by dictionary staff—are better than others and sometimes they almost seem deja vu.

Slop is the word of the year for 2025 by Merriam-Webster’s human editors. They define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.

The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up.

“AI Slop is Everywhere,” warned The Wall Street Journal, while admitting to enjoying some of those cats. “AI Slop Has Turned Social Media into an Antisocial Wasteland,” reported CNET.

Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything. The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was “soft mud.” In the 1800s it came to mean “food waste” (as in “pig slop”), and then more generally, “rubbish” or “a product of little or no value.”

In 2025, amid all the talk about AI threats, slop set a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking. The word sends a little message to AI: when it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes you don’t seem too superintelligent.

Another winner for 2025 words picked by Merriam-Webster’s staff is gerrymander.

Throughout 2025, when Republicans and Democrats used redistricting to increase their electoral advantages, gerrymander became a popular search term.

To gerrymander is to divide a state, school district, etc. into political units or election districts that give one group or political party an unfair advantage. The word comes from the name of Elbridge Gerry, an American politician in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Gerry was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and vice president under James Madison, and as governor of Massachusetts he tried to change the shape of voting districts to help members of his political party get elected. His system resulted in some highly irregular and oddly shaped districts, including one (Gerry’s home district) that looked a little like a newt. Upon seeing a map of the bizarre regional divisions, a member of the opposing party drew feet, wings, and a head on Gerry’s district and said “That will do for a salamander!” Another member called out “Gerrymander!” And the term stuck.

The idiomatic phrase touch grass means “to participate in normal activities in the real world especially as opposed to online experiences and interactions.” The phrase is often aimed at people who spend so much time online that they become disconnected from reality. Lookups spiked in September, after the murder of Charlie Kirk, when Utah Governor Spencer Cox spoke passionately about the dangers of social media and urged people to “log off, turn off, touch grass, go hug a family member, go out and do good in the community.”

Though originally used as an insult, touch grass also became something of an aspiration, even a physical quest, for many people who wanted to break their digital addiction. As People magazine reported, “New App Will Block Users from ‘Mindless Scrolling’ Until They ‘Literally’ Touch Grass.

In the age of social media, when all the world’s a cellphone-sized stage, the steep rise in lookups of performative resulted not from any particular news item, but instead from the pervasiveness of what it describes. Performative means “made or done for show (as to bolster one’s own image or make a positive impression on others).”

In 2025 many things were mocked as “performative.” We saw performative politics and activism, performative wokeness and patriotism, and even performative matcha (in which the photogenic green tea was prepared and consumed to impress a usually online audience). Perhaps top among the phrases was performative male, used to describe a young man pursuing progressive women by doing things (carrying feminist literature in a tote bag, for example) those women probably like.

Early in 2025, as President Trump began implementing the tariffs he had promised in his campaign, people following the resulting news and debates wanted to understand what exactly tariffs are.

Tariff refers to “a schedule of duties imposed by a government on imported or in some countries exported goods.” The word entered English centuries ago, via Italian, and originally came (free of charge) from the Arabic word taʽrīf, meaning “notification.”

Six Seven emerged as the hit Gen Alpha slang term of 2025. Meaning nothing in particular, and sometimes repeated in a sing-song voice, it tends to delight kids and frustrate almost everyone else (which is one reason it delights kids). Six seven, or 6 7, comes from the song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by rapper Skrilla, used in viral videos and memes featuring the 6’ 7” NBA player LaMelo Ball.

It’s mostly used as an interjection—such as a thing you might chant, for no particular reason, after hearing the numbers 6 and 7.

Conclave spiked in lookups after the death of Pope Francis in April, when Roman Catholic cardinals from around the world gathered at the Vatican to elect a successor. This meeting, called a conclave, is how new popes have been selected since the 13th century. The word comes from Latin meaning “room that can be locked up.” It originally referred specifically to the locked room where the cardinals nominate, debate, and vote in secret.

Even before Pope Francis’s death, we were already seeing a higher volume of searches for the word in 2025. This interest was driven by the film Conclave which features a fictional version of the secret vote.

Hopefully, you all feel somewhat “enlightened” as we move into 2026!