Femgore versus body horror. Plot armour v howcatchem. Each battle was intense, and that was just the Arts, the first of 13 categories, the panel desperate for one overall winner. For the record, femgore (a horror subgenre where female protagonists have agency in the bloodbath) beat its arty rivals, paving the way for Business, the next category.
Robotext v dynamic pricing. You get the picture, a Zoom confab among six word nerds, from Victoria Morgan, executive editor of the Macquarie, and her dictionary cohorts Carl Bodnaruk and Rebecca Geddes, plus Tiger Webb, the ABC’s editorial policy adviser, and yours truly. The mood was upbeat, the voting brisk. Yet after Business (congrats, attention economy), we hit our first obstacle.
The panel, myself included, whittled down 65 contenders to a winner that should incite our robot overlords.Credit: Aresna Villanueva/Sydney Morning Herald
Each year will have its quicksand categories, those subsets destined to suck the panel into surreal debate. Mid-COVID, those categories were Health and Politics, seeing covidiot outmuscle Delta, or strollout monster net zero. Whereas 2025 presented two sinkholes: Colloquial and Internet.
Slang and cyberspace, in short, the deepening inroads of Gen Alpha and new-gen AI. Come Colloquial, three words elbowed for glory, or phrases if you prefer. (Just on that, all 65 contenders this year are “lexical items” rather than “words”, but the pedantic label of lexical item excites nobody.) Roman Empire was my pick, a nod to the private fixation we all own, inspired by the TikTok discovery that most middle-aged blokes contemplate the Roman Empire more often than you’d expect.
67 was another aspirant, pronounced six-seven, a slang of shadowy meaning drawn from Skrilla’s song Doot Doot. Ephemera, you may suspect, but so-called nonsense words – like cowabunga or skibidi – can serve as membership badges for a generation, with 67 winning Dictionary.com’s word of the year. Though not the Macquarie’s, as 67 shared its category crown with the epitome of alacrity: “ate (and left no crumbs)” .
As for the Internet, coupled with Technology, the prize fight intensified. If 2020 belonged to COVID, this year has been bossed by ChatGPT and every other “clanker”, as AI robots are dubbed. A Star Wars reference, as Carl Bodnaruk verified, clanker debuted in the video-game Star Wars: Republic Commando back in 2005, and later propagated in the TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
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But was clanker the clincher? A darling across the voting bloc, the sci-fi gibe seemed set for the year’s tiara until slop intervened. AI slop, to be precise, the clear victor of the Internet category. Defined as “low-quality content created by generative AI”, slop is our decade’s spam equivalent. Handily the barb can be packed into fusions, such as slopaganda, slop music and corpslop, to name three.
The other heavy-hitter, joining the podium with AI slop (gold) and clanker (silver) was medical misogyny: the systemic prejudice against females in medical treatment, or even the body’s nomenclature, as this column explored last month. As for the public vote, the verdict was similar, placing AI slop before medical misogyny, with attention economy scoring bronze.
