Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Each year since 2004, Oxford University Press has chosen a word of the year, based on usage compiled from new sources across the English-speaking world.

Today, speaker and author, Abou Murray, describes how words reflect

and explain culture. Here's Abdu. Oxford's annual word of the year is more than a linguistic

curiosity. It's a cultural MRI, a snapshot of what society fears, desires, and obsesses over.

Looking at the winners from 2016 through 2025 reveals a decade-long narrative of what

has been called reality collapse, a decreasing ability to perceive the world directly, unmediated

by algorithms, outrage engines, and the gravitational pull of our own preferences.

The trend started with the 2016 word of the year, post-truth, capturing the moment when feelings

began to outweigh facts.

Post-truth was not about sloppy thinking, but a declaration of near-divine autonomy.

If truth is whatever I feel most intensely, reality becomes something I generate, not something

I discover.

This was the initial push down the cultural descent into curated unreality.

A year later came Youthquake, the idea that a surge of young people could shake the social and political order.

It captured the energy of those convinced they could reshape society through activism.

But the youth who embody the post-truth earthquake are now nearly 10 years older. The generation that helped define post-truth

and youthquake has bequeathed a landscape where reality collapse has accelerated.

The words of the year that followed, utilized by the successors to the millennials,

were eerily accurate reflections of the ecosystems millennials built. In 2022, Goblin Mode was the word of the year. It

captured a cultural embrace of laziness, a retreat from discipline and

...