LEX HAS ALWAYS BEEN A FLEX

IT is fashionable to say in India that we did long ago what the West is doing now—though not always with sufficient evidence.

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

So what? Nationalistic licence can match poetic licence in stretching things.

Dictionary.com’s choice for word of the year 2025 has gone to a number—6-7, pronounced six-seven—which I understand is Gen Alpha slang for stuff that is run-of-the-mill or so-so. For the uninitiated, this is the generation born after 2010, as successors to Gen Z.

The wordly-wise website that conferred the dubious honour was candid in expressing its own confusion about the word, saying it is “meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical”, with the hallmarks of ‘brainrot’—Oxford University Press’s word of 2024. It’s a long way from floccinaucinihilipilification, an old coinage meaning the act of estimating something as worthless.

Should we be at sixes and sevens over Gen Alpha exhuming an old English idiom that signifies a state of disarray or confusion? As a shudh-desi, I am a tad upset to hear 6-7 being described as new. In my not-so-humble patriotic opinion, its structure is a play on the old Hindi idiom, ‘Unees-bees ka farak hai’, meaning it doesn’t make a difference.

The venerable Cambridge Dictionary has come up with its own word of the year—parasocial—an intellectual-sounding word defined as a relationship felt by someone between themselves and a famous person they don’t know. It might break Gen Z hearts to learn that the word in question was, academically, first used circa 1956, when their grandparents were young. But then, today the celebrity afflicting the parasocial could even be an AI chatbot.