Rizz or No Rizz: Picking a Word of the Year for 2024

I’ve never picked a word of the year with staying power. Mine all fizzle out by February, sometimes sooner. I don’t remember last year’s word of the year. Maybe it was fickle.

My daughter is usually the one who will ask me, very pointedly, “what’s your word of the year?” I know she will have thought through her selection. She is way more logical and analytical than I am. So, I will try to get her to go first, you know, like when you’re pressed for a funny story about yourself at a training session and then work on getting someone else to go first. Yeah, like that.

This year will be different, I decided. I’ll be ready when she asks and not pull something out of my, er, hat.

So, I googled ‘word of the year’ hoping to get some insight on how to pick a durable word of the year. From that, I learned that Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2023 is “rizz.” Rizz is a pretty cool word although it’s not in my vocabulary, at least yet. Rizz is having that thing, charm, style, magnetism that draws people in. It’s essentially charisma. You can’t try to have rizz. It can’t be a life goal or anything like that. You either have it or you don’t. I know this because I don’t have it, but I know people who do.

I know an 80-year-old guy who has rizz, excessive rizz if that’s thing and everyone I know loves him. I’ve known a couple of kids who’ve had it, one a friend of one of my sons who was just ridiculously charismatic, in a weird ageless, timeless way. He’s in his thirties now and lives far away so hard to say whether his rizz is still on point or faded as he matured. You know rizz when you see it – it’s electric. You meet someone and they just have a lot of voltage.

And here’s the thing, even though I’m not a rizz expert, I know this much. Rizz is rare. A lot of really beautiful, smart people don’t have it. It’s fairy dust sprinkled on very few.

So, I can’t have rizz as my word of the year because the whole point of a word of the year is that it is aspirational. I could aspire to have rizz but that would be silly, a fool’s errand. But having talked about rizz so much, it’s embarrassing to offer up my proposed word for 2024 because it’s so boring and dorky, the opposite of rizz. Like “humble” or “collaborative.”

Lordy, this is where we are.

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash