American Dialect Society once again chooses chaos, names "rawdog" 2024 Word Of The Year

The American Dialect Society—the same august, century-old body that brought us “-ussy” as its 2022 Word Of The Year—has gone ahead and once again decided to choose chaos, naming “rawdog” its WOTY for the year that was. Congratulations, rawdog: You have now thrown caution to the wind and thrust yourself into the national vernacular, with no worries about consequence or protection.

Admittedly, this rawdog ascension wasn’t entirely unprecedented, with the term—which, the ADS notes, has “recently and rapidly burst its sexual bounds to refer to engagement in any activity without the typical preparation or in stone-cold sobriety”—appearing prominently in The New York Times last year. That piece dubbed the term’s recent usage a “dysphemism,” i.e., the opposite of a euphemism, with users employing a vulgar word in order to dirty-up otherwise banal concepts. (Notably, there’s the whole meme of “rawdogging” flights, where people attempt to sit through an entire flight with no onboard entertainment, for the purposes of then getting on social media and getting a lot of attention for saying that they did that thing.)

As is often the case with the ADS’s picks (which have, in the past, included everything from “#blacklivesmatter” and “occupy” to “dumpster fire,” “fake news,” and “insurrection”), there’s definitely some political messaging to this year’s decision. “As one nominator commented this evening,” said New Words Committee member Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright at the group’s voting session last week, “Rawdog is a great choice for Word of the Year as we collectively rawdog the future of American politics in 2025.”

In their write-up of the announcement, the ADS made it clear that they’re in on the joke, writing that, “Members in the 135-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead, they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining,” even, or maybe especially, when it involves The Paper Of Record writing about a word that traditionally means fuckin’ without a condom.