Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: What's happening kind of culturally? The point of the Word of the Year isn't just the word that has had the most dramatic change in usage, but one that provides a really insightful window into a larger conversation that might about cultural change or societal change or things like this.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Welcome to Localization Today. My name is Eddie Arrieta. I'm the CEO here at Multilingual Magazine. And today we have a conversation with the president of Oxford Languages at the Oxford University Press, Casper Grafuhl. Today we're going to be talking more about Oxford Languages, Oxford University Press and the Word of the Year, which this year was brain rot.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Thank you. Yeah, I'm really pleased to be here. I appreciate you inviting me onto the program and, yeah, it's been a busy time. The Word of the Year season is one that I'm always surprised by the amount of attention that the Word of the Year gets.
People really care about language and that makes sense. You know, there's an ownership within a community of the language they use, their own lexicon, how it's changing. And so everybody feels like they've got a stake in Word of the Year. And I always find it interesting how much, how strong of a response we get.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: It was very incredible for us to also see the response, the coverage it got and the connections that we all naturally start making around Word of the Year. Right. And this year was brain rot. I know there were other words shortlisted there. Could you tell us a little bit about the process? How does it work? How do you get to that final word?
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Sure, sure. Well, look, I mean, we've got language experts at Oxford who are tracking language word trends. You know, how vocabulary is evolving all year long, and we're identifying potential candidates for Word of the Year at various times throughout the year. And when we get to this time of year, towards the end, we start to look at a long list of potential candidates and we look at a lot of the data around them, not just frequency, but also the context, what's happening kind of culturally. The point of the Word of the Year isn't just the word that has had the most dramatic change in usage, but one that provides a really insightful window into a larger conversation that might about cultural change or societal change or things like this. And so that we take into consideration as well, we take that long list and through our own experts, we review all of this data and we come up with a short list. And that shortlist this year consisted of six words.
We opened that shortlist up to the public for them to vote over. The last couple years we've allowed a public participation in the process. We think that really helps build stronger engagement. And it's really interesting to see how the public votes and then the commentary and the, you know, all of the conversation around that voting. We look at all of that and then we go back and we look again at the up to the minute usage of those words and how it's changing and then we make a final selection. I really do like the marriage of public participation and the lexicographical experts, you know, that, that together they kind of go through a process of identifying the word of the year has been a really successful scenario for us and one that I hope we continue for years to come.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: I hope so too. And I know in retrospect all the dots seem to connect. And then when I saw brain rot, it just made so much sense when you came to that realization that that was going to be the word of the year. When things started leaking about our, these times that we're going through in our society.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Well look, I mean brain rot, so brain rot, the kind of the definition of brain rot. Brain rot is used to describe the supposed deterioration of a person's mental state due to overconsumption of a lot of low quality material. You know, this year we saw that it's usage really spiked in reference to the kind of endless scrolling through mind numbing content on social media feeds, you know, like TikTok and places like that. And it was, it's interesting, the usage of the term has been growing and increasing all year long. If you look at just from the full year to last year, it's usage has grown by well over 250% and but also the context that it's being talked about and who's using the term. We found it really interesting that the term brain rot has been adopted by a lot of young people and young people are using it in their online conversations. And we thought that was really interesting only because a lot of the content that we were referred to that causes brain rot and also brain rot can refer to the content itself is generated by a lot of these young people who are also amplifying the term brain rot. So there, we thought there's a little, it was interesting the self awareness in that, that there's a little irony in that that you know, it was, we thought it would be valuable to call some attention to that and then watch as people have a conversation around what is happening with this. You know, I think everybody has identified that we are at a moment when this is a Real challenge when the idea of kind of empty, consuming empty calories in some, you know, zombie like state more and more you kind of. That's a real danger of our virtual lives. And so it's a really important conversation to be having. And, and it isn't surprising that the language we use is, indicates, shows us that that conversation is really starting to boil.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: And it seems from our perspective as well that it's, it seems that is a relevant conversation to have 2024 for us in multilingual at least from, from the coverage that we've been doing seemed to be the year of artificial intelligence. And you know, gen AI in particular has made matters even worse for those that consume content because it's so much easier now to just regurgitate so much more of the same. Right. And you see a lot of influencers that realize that a piece of content is popular so they do their own version of that. And because there are so many humans in so many cultural contexts, you can have the same type of content just go around over and over again. And it seems to also relate to this idea that it's not a problem of the what of whether or not you are consuming content or whether or not you are reading things. Because the origin of the word comes from like centuries. Right. I'm from what I remember the first time that was looked was in Henry David Thoreau's book Walden in 1854. And all this information for those that are listening can be found at the Oxford University Press website along with the other shortlisted questions. Shortlisted words for this year. But so it's not a matter of whether or not we're consuming, but what is it that we are consuming? And now there's so much available. Right?
[00:07:51] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think that's interesting. I mean another word that was on our short list, which is a related word was slop, which is referred, which you know, is used this year in the context of AI slop. And that's another example of, of how AI itself is churning out a lot of low quality content. Whether it's just, you know, sometimes almost gibberish or other times it's just not validated and unreliable. You're not sure whether they're, you know, that's even true or not. And so AI is amplifying our, the, the kind of amount of material that we're being inundated with and so much of it isn't, isn't enriching our lives at all. And some of it is actually starting to confuse things and some of the consumption of that Content actually leads to kind of a declining quality of virtual and real life. And so, you know, there's a whole vocabulary that we are really highlighting as a society that shows our concern about these issues, which are very real right now.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: And this is really, really good to see it. Really good to know that the Word of the Year can have the level of.
This is not the first time that at Oxford University Press works on the Word of the Year. And you've been in the organization without saying much for the last 26 years, which I found incredible and amazing.
Tell us a little bit more about the history of the Word of the Year and the impact it's had in the past few years.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: Yeah, so, I mean, as you say, I've been at OUP for over 26 years. It's a fact that I'm kind of both proud and slightly embarrassed of that I've been here for so long. But I've. But what it's allowed me to do is to see the progression of Word of the Year. We've been announcing a Word of the Year for two decades now. And you know, it's been really interesting to see how that's evolved. I mean, there are some years, you know, some years of the Word I feel like has resonated and caught a cultural moment and a cultural conversation more than others. But I think that in general, when the Word of the Year has really had a high impact, it's because it, as I was saying before, it stimulates a bigger conversation. You know, something that, you know, the language we use can sometimes highlight, you know, something, something that's happening to who we are and who we're, where we're going that we really want to talk about. And this can become a vehicle for it. I mean, I think back to 2015, we made a controversial decision with Word of the Year where we didn't actually pick a word. We selected an the face with tears of joy emoji as the Word of the Year, which wasn't really a word at all. And what was so interesting is there were die hard traditionalists, language traditionalists, who were outraged that, you know, we were selecting an emoji instead of a word. There were people who celebrated that in a way that was really interesting to see how they got behind it. And there were a lot of conversations around it. But what it did was it really helped.
It contributed to a conversation that was already happening about online language and how we're communicating digitally and how a lot of our communication is changing and evolving because of all of these digital Environments that we're passing things back and forth in. And so we thought that was a really.
I find that. I thought that was a really successful year because it created a lot of noise and a lot of buzz, and the conversations were much bigger than the word of the year, which is really about what's happening to how we're communicating with each other, which was a really big topic. And I think the emergence of emojis was a real moment that made us realize that things are changing really rapidly in how we express ourselves to everyone else.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Yeah, you probably could look back on how things looked 20, 25 years ago, even the use of things like social media, LinkedIn, the type of content that we put out there, and how some things have stayed and how some things have disappeared in the past few years, for the past two decades. And you've been president of the Oxford Language Division at OUP for the past seven years or so.
What have you seen that has changed in this industry? And we love to call it the language industry, but the conversation about communications that you were referring to, things have changed. Technologies are coming. And now with gen AI and artificial intelligence, we've all been forced to have these deep conversations. What have you seen from oup? From your roles?
[00:13:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is, you know, even Oxford Languages, which is a division of Oxford University Press, you know, we've evolved from really being a dictionary publisher to being a language data and service provider because the world's changing in a way that we get a. We meet a lot of our language needs and language queries are answered not by going to a book on a shelf or even to an online dictionary site and looking up a word and, you know, reviewing either the definitions or the pronunciation or the spelling. You know, you. You want to answer a question about that word most of the time that's now embedded into kind of experiences and journeys in our. In our other digital products. And so we start to work with technology companies and we started doing this, you know, well over a decade ago, probably 20 years ago or so, we really started to get involved with places like Google and Apple around making language data available on the platforms and in the applications that people are engaging in so that it can be a seamless experience. You know, when you think about a Google search and the one box that kind of comes up sometimes when you put in a word, and if Google thinks that it's likely you put that word in because you want to know how it's spelled or what it means before the results come up, you get that one box, you know, we've provided all of the material for that one box, not just in English, but in about 70 other languages. You know, same when you localize your. Your phone, your Apple Phone into, you know, whatever language you want it to operate in. Those all come from Oxford. And so what's interesting is that even though our kind of direct dictionary business has really been in decline, the impact that Oxford Languages has been having has actually been really extending. Our reach has been growing because we work with so many technology companies to embed really quality language data into these experiences that we all have virtually. And that's been the biggest change I've seen over the course of the last 10 or 15 years in terms of, you know, language trends for us, is that, you know, you no longer take a moment out and have a lexical query. You expect that to be, you know, seamlessly part of whatever experience you're already in.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: For me, was really interesting to realize the number of languages that you're involved with. And I love to ask you about that right after you tell us a little bit more about what the nature of definitions is doing for you to be able to work in data and other types of language services. Because in AI, and I've heard this so many times this year, which is. Is all about the training data. But if you don't have things, simple, basic things like the definitions of words and the evolution of such definition, it's really difficult to do many other things, let alone like localize and then culturalize and do very different things. So those repositories, you know, I presume you have a very large team, or maybe not as large as you wish, but to do all these languages, how does it work from OUP and from Oxford languages, of course, to be able to provide all these.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we work with a lot of local language, either dictionary or language publishers, in order to, you know, get a lot of that, the basic data from them that, you know, that they've spent years developing and fine tuning and, you know, and we put it into a format that makes sense for the technology partner.
What I find interesting is that we've tried very hard to be in a spot where we're able to kind of embed intelligence into data in many languages. And what is really helpful is that in a definition or a dictionary or something like that, when we think about it, we're thinking about what is human kind of readable, but really, ideally, what you need to do is to develop a lot of content and add in Metadata and that makes it really machine readable. That really makes it so that it's highly ingestible by computers. Now that we were already doing that when AI really hit the scene in a way where generative AI kind of with ChatGPT and the like, which is only a few years ago, the demand for training data spiked. It went up dramatically. These large language models are insatiable in terms of the amount of data they want to train on and they absorb it all into a huge sea to a massive corpus of which then they learn from and are able to respond to. But one of the interesting things that you just brought up is that sometimes you need a stable kind of piece of data. You want, you know, you don't want your chatbot every time you ask it for the definition of a word, you don't want it to make it up every time. I mean, even if it's mostly right and it's just, you know, just it's worded a little differently or, you know, you want consistency, you want to make sure that when you're looking at a definition that it's the same every time. It's the same when you look it up as when the teacher in the class looks it up and when a student looks it up and when you're doing it on an assignment or what you. And so that consistency is really important. And for, and training data for AI models work in a very different way. This is there, you know, the way in which you can create a stable answer is by making your data available for, to these models for real time retrieval. You know, it's called rag sometimes where in this isn't, you know, our language data, they maybe haven't trained on it. But when an AI model or an engine, a large language model, has a query from a user and it's clear from that query that they want the definition or the spelling or the pronunciation of a word.
They can in real time go to a database of our data in that language, find the right answer, serve it up as the output to that user, and then also they can credit and say, this comes from Oxford University Press and that stamp of approval allows the user to know. Not only did the chatbot give me the answer, but they've confirmed that this is the official definition that came from Oxford University Press, so it's validated. I think that's really important in this AI age is that we're starting to make a distinction between what is okay for a AI model to come up with on the fly using, you know, massive amounts of Understanding and knowledge that it's trained on. And when do we want it to actually pull something that comes from a sighted source that we know we can trust? And I think with a lot of our language data, we're finding that these AI developers, when they think about lexical queries, you know, wanting definitions or things like this, they want that trusted source, they want to be able to point to the trusted source. And so I'm feeling very confident that our data in the AI age is just as relevant as it was beforehand.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: It was. And I remember, you know, when I was in high school and primary school, going to a dictionary in so many cases became like the de facto debating tool. You just go and check it out, see what the definition was, and then go from there. Right.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: And what's ironic about that is, look, I mean we're, we're, we're not trying to be language police, you know, we are, our program is a descriptivist, you know, as opposed to prescriptivist, you know, we are really just analyzing real language usage and recording and reflecting how people are using language and how it's changing.
But the truth is, as you say, people go to the dictionary and when they want like the official answer, you know, they want, they want a judgment, you know, even though we're not here to provide any judgments, what's in that dictionary gets taken very seriously. And so we take that responsibility also very seriously. And it's one of the reasons why it's really exciting to think about all of the tools that we now have available with which we can track and analyze language and meaning and uses and, you know, understanding the particular sense of a word and when that's changed. And what's interesting is a lot of AI tools are going to enable us to do that better and better so that we're more able to really understand the nuance of how language is changing and then present that to people so they can see really in an evidence based way how their use of language is evolving.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's not just that you are in the case of translation, it's not that this word means this and then you just directly translate it. Like it gets much more deeper than that. And I was very interested about what you were mentioning. You were saying how while the printing dictionaries business has decreased, which is similar to how Physical Magazine works, there are other avenues that open up.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: For 2025, what are some of the things that you see are already kind of like opening up for Oxford Languages Division? And where are some of the places that you will want the team to go in 2025?
[00:23:19] Speaker A: Well, I do think, I mean, look, there's a lot of interesting avenues. One of the things we've already started to talk about, which is how we make our data available to AI developers, I think, is, you know, I would expect to continue to see more and more momentum and activity in that space, you know, where we can really make a difference there.
And also I do think that there are certain trends that I find interesting, you know, in edtech and places where, you know, in educational environments, I think that there's a real opportunity to think about how we incorporate our language data into the new technology that's moving into the education space in the classroom. You know, how. I'm also interested in how AI tools are changing what teaching is like and how pedagogy works. You know, I think that there's a way for us to get more involved in the language side of that. So there's a lot of avenues that are opening up to us that may have been there before, but I think that with the advent of AI enabled products and tools in these digital worlds, there are some real opportunities, I think in 2025 and beyond that, we'll see for us to play a bigger role and have a bigger impact in how these tools can address language challenges.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Excellent, Casper, and thank you so much for talking more about what you're doing at Oxford Languages, the Oxford Languages division, of course. As we were talking about the Word of the Year, something came to my mind and we talked about brain rot. We also talked about slop. We also talk about the emoji time.
Are there any other words in the past two decades that have really stuck to you that you can remember that you say, okay, that word was particularly powerful for any specific year in particular, or any words that you still still hold with you?
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think there are a few. I think in 2013, so what? That's 11 years ago, selfie was selected as our Word of the Year. And now, of course, you know, selfie is ubiquitous, we think, but it was really on the rise and it caught a moment of sort of a kind of social digital culture that was really exploding into the mainstream. So that like, you know, your grandmother might, you know, have now used the term selfie. And it was funny, but, you know, but the fact that she'd heard of it. When we made it the Word of the Year, we had so many people, you know, not only did they comment on the word of the year, but everybody shared selfies as part of that Word of the year that I remember the Mars rover, in honor of Oxford's Word of the Year, sent back a selfie of itself that it took, you know, on the planet Mars, you know, and so it really felt like that was the one that captured a real moment and a moment around how so much of our lives was moving into the virtual space. You know, think of another year where, you know, like last year even, for example, Riz was our word of the year. And what I found really interesting about Riz is Riz is a fun word to say. You know, I mean, it's just, it's got a lot of swagger and it's got a lot of energy. And so, you know, that part, it had that going for it. But what Riz highlighted was the power of a new young generation that online was churning out linguistic change that was kind of driving language trends. Riz was a word of, you know, of Gen Alpha, which was just kind of announcing itself last year as a really potent force in the culture, you know, and all the language that they were adopting, whether it was old language that they rediscovered or new words that they were making up. And what I found really interesting was it created last year with the Whiz being the word of the year. There was a whole conversation around intergenerational language.
How are young people talking and how are their parents understanding this? Gen alpha are 12 and 13 year olds, 11 year olds. These are kids. And yet they were. We were seeing word trends that were really kind of initiated by them that would spike really fast in these online communities. And then of course, the minute that someone like me had heard of that word, by then it probably was already passe that the 12 year olds were just like, okay, by the time a cut gets to me, they've already thought of that as like a stale word that they rolled their eyes if I asked them the question. But I think that was a really, you know, it was really interesting to see the, the acknowledgement around how, you know, different age groups, you know, how language moves through them, and what it means about an identity for a particular community that's based around your generation.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: I can already tell in my mind, I would love to work on an article for the magazine where we have different words for the past two decades and how they align to the different moments in time. I think it's very powerful.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. We've had a lot of, for example, we've had several years where we've had environmental focused words where really we saw in that year a particular preoccupation with climate change or things like this spiking and so that we picked up on as a word of the year. So, you know, really. And look, as I said, some years are more successful than others in capturing something that the public wants to talk about at that moment. But all of them, we really try to reflect some of the preoccupations of, you know, as I said, sort of who we've, who we have been in the last year and, and what it says about where we're going, how we're evolving.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: And I love that I, we're coming to an end of the conversation and we really appreciate your time. But, but Casper for Brenda Robert Rut and just coming back to the word, I share the concerns because I see it in myself, right? Why I love reading and listening to music, playing music myself. You know, there are certain habits that kind of like build on your character, build on your spirit and many other things that we have as humans. For you in particular, as a human, right.
What is the, what impact is the, is this word having in your day to day life? What are your recommendations to kind of like fight brain rot, even if it's just coming from like your own personal actions that could help the listeners kind of like understand a little bit more about like why it might concern us?
[00:30:37] Speaker A: Well, look, I mean, earlier you mentioned that brain rot isn't necessarily a new term. You know, it's just been used in a, you know, a particularly strong growing context right now. It actually, as you said, was first coined in the book Walden by Henry David thoreau in the 1850s. And thoreau was, I mean, his, he was a naturalist, someone who advocated kind of quiet reflection, going outside, enjoying nature, you know, really being present in your physical life. And you know, he was, I guess, an early advocate of that concept of touching grass. And I think that it's fitting, you know, he was the one who, as our first recorded use of brain rot because it's a reminder that there is an antidote to brain rot. You know, the idea of stepping outside, being really present in where you are kind of physically, you know, putting your hands in the ground or taking a walk outside or moving into nature, but like really letting your, your physical senses be activated and be grounded in where you are at the moment. That is the opposite of the kind of digital brain rot that, you know, has permeated our lives. And so I do think that there are, there is a, often when there is a strong movement in one direction, there's a counterbalance, there's a movement. I start to I'm starting to see as a result of the commentary around the Word of the Year and all of the conversations that it started, I've started to see the evidence of a real movement around making sure that we have a balance in alternatives to the social media feeds that can kind of steal hours of your life. That people are being much more conscious of that this year. They're talking about brain rot because there are ways in which we can make sure that we don't lose ourselves to these kind of social media time sucks.
[00:32:54] Speaker B: I see how my family is starting to shame one another. Whenever someone is on the phone for too long or if there is like a couple and they are having dinner and then they are both on the phone, my friend taking pictures of them being like, are you really there? And it is all fun and jokes. But at the end of the day, I think we internally know that it is critical for us to really be in contact that is not about using or not using. It's not about whether a kid has access to an iPad or not. But is okay is this balanced access to the digital world. Kasper, once again, thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with us before we go today?
[00:33:36] Speaker A: No, I just wanted to say that, yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me to explore the word of the year this year and I look forward to having more conversations. And we are already starting to track language that is going to be changing and evolving over 2025. And so I hope to be back again with you next year and have a conversation about the year in language that we've just had.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think it's going to be a fantastic conversation. We love to keep track of this and I really mean it when I say we need to have an article talking about some of these amazing words and what they have met. So the multilingual team is going to get in contact with OUP and with the Oxford Languages Division. Kasper, thank you for joining us today.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: Thank you, Eddie. Bye bye.
[00:34:24] Speaker B: And this was our conversation with Casper Gr, the president of of Oxford Languages Division at the Oxford University Press. My name is Eddie Arrieta. I'm the CEO here at Multilingual Magazine. Thank you so much for listening, Casper. Have a great time this Christmas.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: You too.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: All right, bye bye everyone.
