“Rizzpect and respect”: linguist Maxim Krongauz commented on the world “Word of the Year”

The publishers of the academic Oxford Dictionary recognized this slang word as the most “attractive”

The publishers of the academic Oxford Dictionary have announced the slang word “rizz,” meaning “attractiveness” or “charm,” as the word of the year for 2023. To do this, they had to compile a list of eight words, hold a public vote for the “best” ones, and then entrust linguistic experts to weed out three of the final four words. The choice of MK’s British colleagues was commented on by the famous Russian linguist, Doctor of Philology, Maxim Krongauz.

– Maxim Anisimovich, do they also hold “lexical elections” in Russia? Who decides which word contains the most important phenomenon of our life?

– There are several competitions. Some take place on social networks, and there is also the “Word of the Year” from the Pushkin Institute of Russian Language. These competitions have different procedures and different words win.

– Which word do you personally consider to have absorbed the entire year of 2023?

– Just yesterday at the conference they were discussing which words can claim such a title – all of them are related to artificial intelligence. We looked at the phrase “artificial intelligence,” an abbreviation for AI, but agreed that in Russian the phrase “neural network” is still most often used.

In addition, the word “prompt”, which is not yet very common in Russian, but is already popular in English (it was on the “short list” of the Oxford Dictionary), comes into view.

– What does it mean?

– Request to the neural network.

– So everything now revolves around AI?

– There is also such an interesting word “phygital sports” – a new direction, a combination of cyber games and regular sports. And I would mention a new word with a curious meaning: situation-ship. This is a new type of sexual relationship without mutual obligations. As we see, in this area there is also a search for verbal novelties.

– Is there an authoritative institution in Russia similar to the publishing house of the Oxford Dictionary?

– No, Russian lexicography is structured fundamentally differently. We have famous dictionaries, but no famous publishing houses. In the Western tradition, on the contrary, there are no dictionaries associated with the name of their creator (example: the dictionary of Dahl, Ozhegov, Ushakov – author). And there, by the way, the most popular versions of the “Word of the Year” are dictionary ones: from the Oxford Dictionary and Collins English Dictionary (Britain), as well as from the American Merriam-Webster dictionary.