The enshittification of social media left her doomscrolling through a polarized feed, her brainrot deepening with every bratty meme war.
Enshittification, brainrot, brat and now polarization have been selected by major dictionaries as their word of the year. Merriam-Webster reports that it selected the word over contenders such as demure, totality and allision.
We define polarization as "division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes."
The word was widely used across the media landscape. Fox News reported that "Vance's debate answer on immigration crisis shows voter polarization," while MSNBC observed that, "The 2024 presidential election has left our country more polarized than ever." The word was also used to describe divides beyond the U.S. election, as when Forbes warned that in workplaces, "cultural polarization is becoming a pressing challenge."
MW doesn't go there, but "polarization" functions in media as a thought-stopping cliché so you don't have to contextualize the meaning or matter of politics beyond pointing at the left-right spectrum and shouting "and they're off!' into the mic.
The Associated Press reminds us of last year's pick there.
Last year's pick was "authentic." This year's comes as large swaths of the U.S. struggle to reach consensus on what is real. "It's always been important to me that the dictionary serve as a kind of neutral and objective arbiter of meaning for everybody," Sokolowski said. "It's a kind of backstop for meaning in an era of fake news, alternative facts, whatever you want to say about the value of a word's meaning in the culture."
