Welcome to our language: ‘rizz’. Here’s the OED definition: colloquial noun, ‘defined as ‘style, charm or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner’. It was announced on Monday as the Dictionary’s word of the year, and it’s been amusing to see some commentators talk about it like they’d heard it before.
Rizz became popular the way all words do now: they start somewhere opaque online, then filter effortlessly into real life. As a 23-year-old, I use it with friends semi-frequently, although I kind of wish I didn’t.
It’s dispiriting the way the internet is hallowing out language. If we speak worse, we think worse; as Orwell said, ‘the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts’. And ‘rizz’ is just one example of the lazy ways that language develops now.
The jargon of viral Twitter and TikTok is producing a stale monoculture. When words go ‘viral’, it means that everyone starts using them. They become clichés immediately. The worst example of this zombie language is the decline of adjectives, and the replacement of descriptive terms by saying something has ‘X’ vibes. ‘Vibes’ is a linguistic cop-out. You don’t have to explain anything, because saying ‘vibes’ will do the trick. Some other horrendous examples include: ‘it’s giving cringe’ – which is similarly vague – or saying that something ‘hits different’ if you can’t place why Coca Cola tastes better in the cinema. Listen to the mood-based names of the playlists that the Spotify bots are recommending me: #lightacademia, #duvetday, #serotonin, #bottomlessbrunch. Thomas Frank, in his book The Conquest of Cool, showed how big business adopts the counterculture and sells it back to consumers. The new language, it turns out, is good business.
It would be fine if this language was plain, intelligible or funny. Instead, it is neither creative nor accessible. In its airy talk of ‘energy’ and vibes’, it’s weirdly occultist.
Martin Amis’s argument was that clichés of language are clichés of the mind. He wrote that ‘style is morality’, since elegant style reveals elegant thinking. Amis’s floweriness is sometimes juxtaposed to the plainness of Orwell, but the two men had the same belief in the essentialness of good language. In Politics and the English Language, Orwell wrote that:
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved.
We’re all those ‘kind of dummies’ now, evoking buzzwords with little thought behind them. Stock phrases such as ‘decolonisation’ and cynical theories like postmodernism become applied to almost anything regardless of the context, because they are a faux-clever substitute for original thought. It’s how you end up queering boats, as Portsmouth museum workers did to the Mary Rose earlier this year. It’s how you end up with Phoebe Bridgers calling Queen Elizabeth II a war criminal. It’s how you end up with Israel being called a ‘Nazi’ state in infographics. ‘Nazi’ = worst thing, ‘Israel’ = worst thing, so Israel = Nazi! It’s not thinking, it’s memeing.
The internet should have exposed all of us to a much more diverse culture, but it’s done the opposite. As we spend more time on the internet, we’re catching the same patterns of speech and the same patterns of thought. I’ll keep saying ‘rizz’, but it’s not reactionary to suggest that ‘vibes’ is bad vibes.
