Words of the Year

What are your favorite words from 2023? Here are some of mine.

Remember when the word of the year was “cloud?”

Ahh…“words of the year.” I’m fascinated by the way language evolves. Young people love to tamper with it, and olds like me love to complain about it.

Our language is important and we should treat it with the respect it deserves. Sometimes an innovation occurs that alters the meaning of a familiar word in way up with I am disinclined to put.

Stunning is overused as an everyday compliment to the extent that I’d like for us to agree now to discontinue using it for any purpose other than marking the non-lethal setting on a phaser. It has become synonymous with “attractive” but ought to be reserved for describing beauty of overwhelming intensity, not — for example — a sequined iPhone case, or the pixel density of an LCD screen.

Authentic is a favorite of mine because it is such a reliable predictor of impending bullshit. Especially when it is used by marketers or the HR department, it dependably signals someone is about to say something that isn’t.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Oh my god, I love rizz!

It means “words of charm or persuasion.” You might imagine a smooth-talking suitor trying to verbally woo a mate. Adapt the term by cramming the word in wherever you can make it fit:

Examples: A question answered with a cleverly-embedded compliment is issued by a “first rizzponder.” Someone who missed their train due to a delay caused by unwanted attention from an admirer was “caught in a brizzard.” If your friend Lizzie did a great job on a job interview, you could promote her to “Queen Erizzabeth”. If you send a friend seeking sage advice on how to better wield such charm, you might send them “off to see the rizzard.”

Words about words are the best! I love one with such malleable applications. Rizz can and should be pressed into very versatile service! I heard it applied recently to the poetic efforts (inadequate) of a young person (disconsolate) to induce a parent (by then, obdurate) to be given payment (immoderate) in exchange for doing his chores (outcome: stalemate.)

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Hallucination is a word about words that I despise. It’s used lately to describe a particular kind of error made by the powerful but unpredictable technology known as “AI.” There are two important and dangerous ideas at work here.

(AI has itself lost nearly all its meaning. It’s now more or less synonymous with cyber, which is one of many words reserved for use by authority figures to signal a topic is far too complicated for your simple mind to comprehend. It took cyber years to become a quick way to say “you wouldn’t understand, you poor silly fool,” and it seems certain AI has or soon will achieve the same purpose.)

Back to hallucination which Wikipedia describes, when used in this context, as:

a response generated by an AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact.

I’m not sure how this word improves on this much simpler one: lies. Lies are deliberate and have the intent to mislead. Does an AI intend to mislead? For me, it amounts to a willful deception when chatbots confidently provide “answers” that are easily shown to be false. Perhaps AI has the intent to mislead, perhaps not. It would, I suspect, if it could.

A hallucination on the other hand is involuntary, excepting the kind associated with electronic music and glowsticks. Even then, we have a better word for a hallucination that is understood to deviate from reality: delusion.

I wonder why the rather more mysterious word was chosen, lacking as it is in intentionality and free from associations with the criminally insane. Marketing, I guess, and an Orwellian masterstroke of it. This will surely be celebrated for decades, if we last that long.

Executive fun

Executive presents. Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash

The word executive is everywhere lately. People who do my work are sometimes called executive coaches. I coach quite a few executives, but I don’t use this term to describe it. Too often, services marketed this way come packaged with ideas that make me uncomfortable. It’s a signifier of outworn stereotypes that encode ableist, sexist, racist, and patriarchal traditions.

Executive presence is a related idea that always makes me feel a little stabby. Your communication skills, credibility, persuasiveness, and decisiveness are all skills worth practicing. Whenever I see the words in a coaching context, ideas are not far behind that I associate with various kinds of bias: ideas about charisma, tone of voice, appearance, eye contact, dress, posture… and so on.

Are you an executive? Probably! Executive means “someone who makes decisions.” That, my friends, is what people are hoping to see when they go looking for executive presence.

Regrettably, we are habituated to expect that people who make decisions will look and sound a certain way — probably male, white, and neurotypical. When people look or sound different then you expect in a context you’re accustomed to, it can feel a bit disconcerting. That feeling is called bias.

It’s taken some practice, but after years of coaching on presentation and communication skills I’m very nearly able to do it without reinforcing stereotypes or promoting toxic behaviors. The world doesn’t need more people brimming with unearned confidence, or people who can eerily simulate conviction even when they haven’t a clue. We have computers for that now.

If you speak with an accent, or you rarely make eye contact, or you look or sound different from others you see presenting — these are not deficiencies for a coach to help you overcome. Many of the most successful people on the planet have no rizz at all. They succeed because of the strength of their ideas, and their ability to reveal their passion and vision for what they believe.

As a coach, I am by definition people in a position of privilege. To me, it feels like gatekeeping for coaches or other leaders to tell people that the way to become successful is to simply become more like us.

It’s not their minds that need changing, it’s ours.

Where it Counts

Leaders like people managers, trainers, and executive coaches — can choose to focus on helping make change where it’s needed the most.

We can do that by interrogating our own biases, celebrating the differences that make our team amazing, and asking more of our peers and the leaders we follow.

Language empowers us to see all of the challenges we face in new and different ways. The words we choose to use matter. Words can make us dangerous, or inspiring; they can be insipid, and they can be divine. I hope you’ve enjoyed the words I chose for you this week, and that I’ll see you back here next Tuesday.