Strolling in the aisles: the 2021 Word of the Year
The Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC) – what a magical sounding place! – has revealed its Word of the Year for 2021: strollout.
Readers will, of course, know precisely what the word means: the overly relaxed initial pace of Australia’s Covid-19 vaccination program.
Many words, most of them positive, have been written about this particular word. The general consensus is that the ANDC made a good choice. Strollout easily fulfils the first criterion of a word of the year candidate: it is achingly topical. The progress of our vaccination program determined how quickly we could look ahead to a life that isn’t defined by daily Covid-19 case numbers.
Linguistically, too, strollout is a delight. It’s a logical construction reminiscent of German compound words which merge two existing words. And, crucially, it’s fun to say! Kudos to its originator.
But, despite this, I cannot stay silent: the ANDC has missed the obvious candidate.
Living in Melbourne, one word and concept has come to define the Covid-19 era above all others. It has infiltrated our life, been the subject of anxious conversations with friends and family members and been incessantly encountered in the news.
That word, I’m sure you already know, is lockdown.
Although ours had the dubious honour of being the world’s longest, lockdowns haven’t only affected Melburnians. There isn’t a state or territory that hasn’t been placed into a lockdown of some sort since the outbreak of the pandemic. So it is hard to understand how, across 2021 and 2020, the only reference made by the ANDC to lockdown is Clayton’s lockdown – defined as “a lockdown considered to be inadequate to slow the rate of COVID-19 community transmission.”
Lockdown has gone from a word seldom used to one which at times has dominated the national conversation – as can be seen from the below image, taken from Google Trends.
I presume already-existing words are eligible for selection as the Word of the Year. Bubble made the longlist in 2020.
Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps the ANDC felt it was too political a choice, or that it didn’t sufficiently capture the zeitgeist. Whatever the reason, this is the closest I have felt to sorrow that the concept of lockdown is receding from our public lexicon.
Just in case I’m at risk of being taken seriously, here is my lukewarm take on past ANDC Words of the Year and longlisted candidates:
2021
Winner:
Strollout – see my extended thoughts above.
Candidates:
Double-vaxxed – a solid choice. Highly deserving of silver.
Clayton’s lockdown – I had not heard of this before.
Fortress Australia – I’d have preferred Fortress WA.
AUKUS – I guess acronyms are in?
Net zero – by making it on this list, the ANDC has treated it more seriously than the Australian Government.
2020
Winner:
Iso – it had to be Covid-related, so this is a decent choice.
Candidates:
Black Summer – yes.
Bubble – maybe this explains why I hadn’t heard of Clayton’s lockdown.
Covid-normal – if only we’d made it there.
Driveway – hmmmm.
2019
Winner:
Voice – a noble and deserving pick.
Candidates:
Quiet Australians – oh right, it was an election year.
Fish kill – a horrifyingly evocative way to describe our ongoing ecological catastrophe.
Influencer – feel like the ANDC were a little late to this one.
Climate emergency – sure.
2018
Winner:
Canberra bubble – hey, wait a minute! So bubble or an iteration thereof is on here twice?
Candidates: dramatically, there are no candidates listed on the main award page, and the link to a post which promises more information (including the longlist) appears to be broken. Perhaps, like the Somerton Man, this is destined to become one of the great unsolved mysteries of Australian life.
The Word of the Year process is an inspired bit of marketing: choose a word at the expense of others and elicit easy content from writers looking ahead to Christmas and semi-serious debate among people who listen to Radio National. But beyond that, it succinctly captures the winding path of national discourse in the past 12 months. The ANDC is not, I assume, in the business of predicting future words of the year. But in announcing its yearly list, it does a fine job of telling us where we’ve been.