Well, merde, as the French would say, or sh-t, if you’re English. Elevating a bit of toilet humor – enshittification –  to Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year may delight the scatologically inclined amongst us, but what a sign of the times it is. Having defined it somewhat tautologically as ‘the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided,’ the dictionary notes coyly, ‘This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.’

Bodily functions hold an honorable and humorous position in literature, from Aristophanes to Chaucer and beyond. The Frenchman Le Petomane famously made a stage career out of farting on demand. Poo and fart jokes reliably entertain small children, and many of the rest of us; as children in church one time, my brother and I heard the old man in front of us fart loudly, and naturally we collapsed into uncontrollable giggles. Every time we regained our composure, the solemnity of the service and the stern glances of those around us set us off afresh. Nature’s dictates can strip all of us of dignity, which is as it should be.

But that’s hardly what the dictionary was referring to; for the sensibilities of Speccie readers, let us use the French, merde, instead of the ugly, clumsy new term. I first came across it this year, in a Reddit chat about poor quality clothing, where seams split and buttons fell off new purchases, even from brands that had been deemed ‘good’. My daughter, 27, complaining about Sydney housing, had commented similarly: ‘Everything feels like it’s going to shit.’ Neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor the USA’s Merriam-Webster stoop to recognising the term. Given that it won the popular vote here as well as the Macquarie committee’s choice, that may just show Australians’ greater crudity, or willingness to call a spade a spade, if you wish.

There was a time when the West cared more about quality than convenience, and that time is over, to give the merde crowd their due. Arguably, our education standards were once higher, we were not so fat and sick, our manners were better, our values were clearer and more elevated, our clothing was better made, and foodstuffs less poisoned with industrial chemicals. And then there’s tech, alternately essential and enraging. Our kids have been trying to prise a 1997 Magna away from us; it’s solid, pre-electronic and has the luxury of wind-down windows. When Skynet takes over we will escape in it.

Macquarie blames the profit motive for the merdification of our goods and services, but profit’s hardly new. Ever since the family home stopped being the primary producer of food and clothing, business people have been cutting corners to make more money. It is possible that there was a golden era of quality, affordable goods and services, but not in my experience. When products are high quality they are rarely affordable, and judging cheap modern goods by the standards of yesteryear overlooks the unaffordability of yesteryear. I still have a beautiful Dominex wool suit, bought in 1979 for what was then three weeks’ entire salary. Few of those complaining about clothing quality would spend an equivalent $6,000, in today’s wages, on a suit. Industrial goods, synthetic goods, factory ‘foods’, these can all be standardised and rushed off assembly lines cheaply, but yes, they are more rubbishy than the real things, painstakingly grown or made.

What I do think is happening is an erosion of standards caused by eco-lunacy and nanny statism. Energy costs are painfully high, and this cascades through every step of every production cycle. Net-zero goals are costing jobs and forcing firms to jump through new hoops simply to continue what they already do. Planet-saving congestion taxes make transport slower and costlier, with no efficiency dividend – or temperature effect.

Green overlords are everywhere trimming our lifestyles. Take, for example, laundry. The days of steaming hot water gushing from our taps is long gone. Our taps are now heat-governed, to stop us scalding ourselves; hot water cannot come out at more than 50 degrees Celsius. If you want to wash laundry at a bacteria-killing temperature, your washing machine will have to heat the water to 65 degrees Celsius and as much as 90 degrees Celsius, so hot washes take longer. Our taps no longer gush, as low-flow taps have been mandated to cut water use. Laundry powders too have been rendered less effective. Following the US lead, laundry phosphates were banned in 2011, to reduce algal bloom, never mind that Big Ag uses mountains more phosphate than mere households. Phosphates soften water and help detergents clean; if you’ve wondered why stains don’t come out easily in an ordinary wash and supermarkets now have shelves of stain remover, that could explain it. The dapper Jeffrey A Tucker of think tank Brownstone Institute is so incensed by green laundry strictures that he advises washing the old way, by hand, with boiling water in a tub and adding phosphates yourself. Then there’s the decay of whitegoods of all kinds, built to green standards but not quality ones, and you see we are all in a race to the bottom. One bugbear of mine is the 2014 ban on boxes of moth-deterring naphthalene flakes; instead we have ineffective little white balls in green cages which vanish in a flash. This was apparently to save kids from eating the pungent, toxic stuff. If you’re going to ban things that could harm kids, most households would have nothing in them. We are labouring under the oppression both of a green white-anting of living standards, and an infantilising nanny statism.

The flip side of this is a widespread sentimentality for eras when things seemed to be better. To work better, to be more carefree. Nostalgia is in vogue, to wit, the recent popularity of film cameras, flip phones, vinyl records, CDs and much more. Retro strategies are driving nostalgia marketing; think of the Barbie and Maverick movies, not to mention the endless movie franchise reruns. If you Google nostalgia among Gen Z and Millennials, you’ll find screen after screen reporting a longing for the authenticity and security of the past. This hunger for the good old days says less about how good the past was, and more about how chaotic, difficult and unstable the present is.

Merde indeed.