The Oxford English Dictionary, the preferred dictionary for all weight-lifters, recently announced their Word of the Year 2023. It is rizz. It is taken from the word charisma, which is obviously too long for many people to pronounce today. Also, you cannot further murder the English language by easily turning it into a verb or adjective. You can “rizz someone up” or “be all rizzed up” but it’s harder to say “I used my charisma to charm someone into doing something I wanted,” or “they were overwhelmed by the charisma of the event.” So now my 20-pound OED will have a few more grams added to it for the sake of ease.
As most of you know, I am a logophile, a lover of words. After all, that’s our primary means of communication. Even other forms of communication- music, art, interpretative dance, smoke signals- are interpreted back into words. They not only inform us, they shape us and the world around us.
Some words stick around but are rarely used. When was the last time you used the word “davenport” to refer to a piece of furniture?
A word we need to bring back is crapulous. It doesn’t mean quite what you think (definition: to feel ill from overeating or binging), but it is a great word for an election year. And it seems we just break into laughter when someone uses the term bipartisan these days.
If you have been around me much for the last 10 years you will notice that I often wear a chain around my neck with two brass washers on it. Each washer has a word on it. One was suggested by my wife Cathy, when I asked her to describe me in one word. I’ll not tell you the word, so you can just imagine what it it, but I wear it to try and live up to what she sees in me. The other has a word that I choose for the year, something I work on or try to live up to. For instance, in 2022 the word was Listen. I wanted to listen more- to people, to nature, to the Spirit. In 2023 my word has been Notice. I decided I needed to pay more attention to what was around me. It has been an interesting year.
I’ve been thinking about my word for 2024. I’ve decided it will be Courage.
By nature, I am a people-pleaser. I do my best to help people get along with each other. I am not very good at confrontation. When I do that, I often feel like I am condemning others- not just their ideas or opinions, but the person themselves. Telling them that they are not worthy of recognition. Maybe that’s because I have often felt that way myself. So, instead of “speaking the truth in love” I do my best Rodney King. (For those of you under 40 years old, Rodney King is an African-American who was caught after a high-speed car chase and then beaten unmercifully by the police. Riots ensued. And seeing even more destruction going on, King made a plea to “get along” rather than saying something like “we need to find a way to prevent this kind of brutality.”)
This next year so much hangs in the balance in our country. We have a significant number of people who have given up on democracy and are ready to turn to a dictatorship. So, what I will need is courage, along with wisdom to speak in winsome ways. Even the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures always ended up giving some hope. Courage is my word.
The purpose of this rambling is not to express my politics, though obviously I do. It’s to get to this question: What is your word for 2024?
PS- If you want to order a word for yourself, go here.
Michael Henderson 