Alright, Rachel, thanks so much for stopping by today. Thanks, John.

Sometimes the story of a year is easy to identify in a single word or two. One word, of course, sums up 2020, pandemic. And in 2021, our word of the year was vaccines. They allowed lots of people in the world to leave their lockdown lives behind. So now the nominees for our word of the year 2022. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the show the economist's language columnist, Lane Green. Hi, Jason.

We

find ourselves here at the end of the year again. How hard was it this time to come up with the word of the year? It was very hard this year. It's hard almost every year, but most years it's because there are too few good candidates in this year. I actually thought there were quite a few interesting words. And so I had to think hard about which one for me was the real word of the year. So I've actually come up with some categories to help me break it down a bit. Okay, let's move to the first category of nominees. So climate change is the big story of the era. And this year, through a couple of new terms, they're not brand new, but they came to prominence, I think in 2022, properly. Extreme weather led to many countries introducing what they're calling cooling centers, places where you could sit in an air condition tent and drink cold drinks and cool yourself off in these really record-breaking hot days that we had through much of the Northern Hemisphere's summer. Then, as winter has set in, we've got the exact opposite and people are talking about warm banks, which are the same thing, except we show up in a place that's heated and get a cup of tea. More to the policy front of things. It's the COP 27 climate change summit this year in Sharmo Sheikh in Egypt. We saw a new term come to the center stage, which is loss and damage. This is the idea that rich countries, whose industrialization has largely caused climate change so far. It's too set up a fund to redress the harms that they have done or are definitely going to do in the future in poorer countries. This puts loss and damage as a new pillar in climate change politics. Okay, climate change clearly a big story, but not the only story of 2022. What's the next category? Well, naturally, I think Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the story of 2022. This has led to a lot of linguistic innovation and linguistic learning, I would say. For example, newscasters have had to practice how to say previously unfamiliar place names, a place like Harkov and Zaporizia. You'll also hear about people who previously hadn't talked a lot about military affairs now having to talk about things like manpads and high Mars and NASMs, these weapons systems that are proving so crucial. These are, of course, acronyms for names, weapon systems that have lots of different words in them. Okay, climate change, war in Ukraine, what other categories we got? Well, I always look at business, finance and economic terms. And obviously, the war in Ukraine led to a lot of financial and economic chaos this year in 2022. And in particular, the rise in energy costs that fed through into the rise of lots of other costs and a year of big inflation. The winner in this subcategory is a pretty obvious one. Shrinkflation is a great word in the sense that it's obvious what it means, kind of if you know any of the context at all, it includes almost all of the words, shrink and inflation. And it's that process whereby companies hide their price increases by keeping prices constant, but by making the products a little bit smaller. But we haven't yet reached the territory of word of the year stuff I'm gathering. Well, let's start with some other choices. For example, Oxford dictionaries, for the first time in their history, opened their process up to a public vote, so they chose three semi finalists, which were a hashtag I stand with the metaverse and goblin mode. And the people have spoken and they have spoken for goblin mode, which is a sort of purported state in which folks indulge their kind of laziest or most selfish habits. I guess goblin mode is kind of a word of the year after years of COVID and recession and now inflation people are very often saying they just feel tired. They just can't really keep up appearances anymore. And I guess that means a lot of people are finding themselves in goblin mode. Now I was one of those people who had never heard of goblin mode before it was announced as a finalist. I'm of the skeptical camp wondering if we're going to be looking back in five years and still saying goblin mode much less remembering why it was indicative of this year in particular. But another product of the sort of COVID era and all of its social changes that it's wrought is my choice for word of the year. All right, let's see if we can't get a drum roll in here. There we go. All right, Lane, what is your word of the year?