Another sad day for the English language. Earlier this week, Oxford Dictionary announced “selfie” as its word of the year. In case you’re too busy making duck faces at your iPhone camera to know, a “selfie” as defined by Oxford Dictionary is “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.”
In order to meet Oxford’s strict requirements for its hallowed title, the word in question doesn’t need to be coined within the past 12 months, but has to have become prominent or notable in that time. According to BBC News, “selfie” can be traced back to 2002 when it was used in an Australian online forum by a man who had posted a picture of injuries to his face after tripping over some steps. He apologized for the out-of-focus image, saying it was not because he was drunk but because it was a “selfie.” All of which is a huge revelation to some members of K&K who’ve been using “selfie” for years as a euphemism for a certain personal activity that first came into prominence during puberty.
Other words that were up for consideration this year but failed to make the cut included “twerk” (a sexually suggestive dance often performed by female child stars on MTV awards shows to usher in their more “serious” adult music career), “binge watch” (consuming large chunks of a TV series often in one sitting due to its availability on Netflix or the sad state of one’s social life) and “schmeat” (which to our surprise is not the male equivalent of “twerk” but a form of meat synthetically produced from biological tissue).
Besides the positive reinforcement of narcissism, the biggest problem we have with Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is that “selfie” isn’t even a real word, unlike K&K’s longtime suggestions of “penile hydra,” “free range crotch chickens,” “moose knuckle” and “bwamff” (the sound a Hostess Twinkie makes when you’re high and you crush it in your bare hand while holding it up to your ear). We would have even settled for moobs, badonkadonk, cintlebrate, sushibration, deleb and even the succinct tl;dr.
Even more troubling is the fact that Oxford Dictionary’s past words of the year winners tend to have a shelf life comparable to that of a British boy band. In 2004, the word of the year was “chav” (as in “Hey look at that chav”), in 2006 it was “bovvered” (as in “I can’t believe I just bovvered that chav’) and last year it was “omnishambles” (as in “My life’s in omnishambles ever since I bovvered that chav”).
