Grammar girl here. I'm Injan Fogarty, and it is Word of Year time. I'm so excited. It's my favorite time of year. And I have Jess Safaris and Danny Heber. Jess is from the Words Unravel YouTube channel. And Danny is from the Linguistic Discovery YouTube channel. Welcome,

both of you. Thank you so much for having me back on the show. This is my favorite time of year.

That's great to be here. Thank you. Danny, yeah, first timer. We're so excited to have you.

And Danny, you made a spirited defense of six, seven recently, so I would love to start with you and that

word of the year from Dictionary.com.

Sure, yeah.

As you might expect a lot of people, I joked that both the Oxford word of the year and

the dictionary.com word of the year were rage bait because Oxford's word of the year was rage bait. And a lot of people

felt rage baited by six, seven as the word of the year. And I think, yeah, there's a lot of reasons I

saw come up why people were upset about it. They were like, it's not even a word. It's multiple words.

It's like numbers rather than words. It's multiple words. It's a phrase, not a word. The most common one I saw was that it's going to be gone in a minute. You know, like it's a flash in the pan and no one will ever say it again. So it started as kind of a long reply on threads. And I was like, no, this would be an interesting news letter issue. So I put that out and kind of explained some of those issues with it. Yeah. Well, I mean, the words of the year, they often are like flash. There are always some flash in the pans that you, I was looking at the words from last year to remind myself. And Brad was one of the words of the year. and I don't think I've heard that since.

Yeah.

Slang is kind of like biological species.

Like most of the biological species on the planet have gone extinct and will go extinct.

You know, there's a very small percentage of words that actually make it through.

Like, if you're into etymology, which we all are here, then you know that, like, from any given proto-Indo-European root, there's often, like, dozens or sometimes, you know, a lot of words that derive from a single root. And it makes it seem like these ancient languages had very few words, but that's not the case. It's just that very few words actually survived. And so we're getting this, like, sliver, this slice of those words. And same with slang. You know, there's one out of every hundred new slang words or something is going to survive and, you know, get legs, as it were. Yeah. I mean, the words of the year, they always break down into sort of two types, too. There's the trendy words that like came out of nowhere this year, suddenly you're hearing everywhere. And then there's the words with like gravitas that are, you know, relevant to the

current like societal thing goings on and seem very important. So we always have both of those

kind of words. I thought it was really interesting. Actually, we are recording this on December 12th, on Friday, December 12th. And I saw just this morning the Austrian-German-Youth word of the year was also 6-7. Oh, nice. Yeah, apparently it's big in Austria, too. And I assume in English, not in German, right? It was 6-7, not like 6ivan. Right. Yeah. Oh, that's fine. With the English. Yeah. That's not too surprising because that's part of when you have cultural uptake of a phrase or something like that, the context in which you hear it is important. And the context includes which language you're hearing it in. So yeah, it just wouldn't have the same kind of cultural meaning if you said it in German or Spanish, probably. It's not about the numbers at all. Right. No, but I did hear math

teachers are incorporating 6-7 into their problem sets to get students more excited about math.

My niece and nephews tell me that we have already moved past the era of trendiness on 6-7 because

the adults got a hold of it. So it's just not cool anymore. Good to know. I heard there's a

hand, a gesture that goes with it. I won't bother learning it now. The little little tidbit I just

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