The American republic is tottering toward its 250th birthday like a character in a Jimmy Buffett song: debauched and in debt, but with its Stanley cup half full and its flip-flops still flapping. Meanwhile, American English remains forever young, a furnace of deregulated creativity. The French language is regulated by the “immortals” of the Académie Française. This is the linguistic equivalent of dirigiste economics, and about as good for growth. The English language grows by the free market, just like Margaritaville Holdings LLC. Put a neologism in print or digital circulation, and if there’s a demand for it, the dictionaries will recognize it.
You read it here first: the word of the year for 2026 will be semiquincentennial. The new Rome gets older, but the old Rome is always with us. An alternative coinage, sesquibicentenntial, is floating around online, but do the Latin math. Sesqui means “one-and-a-half,” bi means “two,” and centennial means “100.” A sesquibicenntenntialis 1.5 x 200 = 300. America’s sesquicentennial will fall in 2076, so you have 50 years to print the T-shirts. The big one in 2026 is the semiquincentennial. For patriotic up-sellers, the quarter-millennium. For Latinists, the quartamillenium, or even the quartamilliarum.
Back to the linguistic embers of the dying year. December is the month when the dictionaries get down with the children. Most of this year’s novelties (chrononeologisms, even) derive from digital life. Merriam-Webster, which bears the name of the man who severed American English from Old World etymologies and liberated the language into democratic anarchy, goes for slop. The Australians, who have lately replaced the Canadians as America’s best impersonators, refine this into artificial intelligence slop.
Oxford University honors its tradition of Wildean wind-ups by nominating rage bait. The incels at Cambridge University go for parasocial, which is what the youth used to call imaginary friends. Parasocial, combining Greek and Latin words, is a barbarolexis, a barbarian coinage, but we expect little better from Cambridge. Given its associations with spies and sexual deviants, and given the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s archive, Cambridge should have nominated Pedo Island.
Dictionary.com, which also keeps it cute, nominated “6-7,” the nonsense phrase that came from the song “Doot Doot” by Skrilla (nope, never heard of him either). Collins, the pick-me girl of lexicography, went for vibe-coding (using AI) along with biohacking (previously “taking your vitamins”), aura farming (posing), glaze (flattery), and three terms for underperformance(coolcation, micro-retirement, taskmasking) that suggest that the young are what Generation X called slackers.
Despite the vandal resentments of Daniel Webster, the roots of the language survive. Oxford missed a trick by not telescoping rage bait into the compound noun rage-bait or ragebait (noun, verbed with seconds of its invention). Merriam-Webster’s version, the hyphenated rage-bait, sets experimentation in the aspic of Georgian persnicketiness. This often happens in American English, where radical novelties coexist with crusty formalities that British English dropped long ago. But in this instance, Merriam-Webster gets it right, though I recommend we use ragebait. Why? Because that compression hits the taproot of our imagination and poetry.
In Old English, the language and alphabet that predate the medieval English of Chaucer, and Old English’s older antecedent, Old Norse, that kind of compound is called a kenning. Two words are fused, creating the metaphorical image of a third (metaphoros means a “carrying-across” of meaning). The sea is a whale-road. The body is a bone-house. The third object suggested by rage-bait is you, the internet user, baited and enraged by your parasocial relationship with Tucker Carlson, who this year was renamed Tucker Qatarlson by Mark Levin, after Carlson, in retro-Soviet style, dubbed him Tel Aviv Levin.
This was the year in which Carlson, the groypers, and their bot army returned the Jewish question (also JQ) and global Jewry to English parlance for the first time since 1933. They call themselves Heritage Americans, though the founders would not have let most of them on the Mayflower. Only in America would the leading white nationalists be a Mexican-Italian (the catboy-loving Nick Fuentes) and an African American (the whitefaced Candace Owens).
While the Heritage Americans capsized the Heritage Foundation, post-liberalism broke through. Like the groyper insurgency, post-liberalism had been brewing for years. The two are not the same, but sometimes they overlap. In 2026, the differences between serious post-liberals, such as Patrick Deneen, and digital mountebanks, such as Auron Macintyre, will become clear. Expect to hear more about civnats (civic nationalists) versus ethnats (ethnonationalists), and plenty of remigration. At this rate, by 2027, we’ll be talking about the Catholic Question.
Midway through the 2020s, are you not entertained? This year, the chungus (the online slob) and the chad (the youth who has been lifting), begat the chud (the low-T chubber). When the chud gets the jab in 2026, his collagen collapse will give him Ozempic face, but he may finally get a GF. Her resort to plumpers will give her pillow face, but she will still be a diva. Is that not gaggy?
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
