3 weeks ago
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For the year 2024, social media platform, TikTok, was certainly one of the most entertaining places to be. It could make, break, or cancel you altogether – total obliteration for those who were deemed to “offend”. In fact, TikTok became so all-pervasive, for lack of a better word, that US lawmakers even considered a TikTok ban.
Anyway, towards the second half of 2024 persons who reside on TikTok popularised the term “very demure, very mindful,” and voilà! Dictionary.com announced on Tuesday that the word of the Year is (drum roll) ‘demure’.
To give this some context, in August, a TikToker by the name of Jools Lebron posted a series of videos on how the be “very demure, very mindful” in various situations from work behaviour to applying make-up, and the TikTok nation ran with it. Just like they did with Macka Diamond and TikToker Derrick Morgan’s viral hit, What Can Go So.
From the middle of August, news outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Rolling Stone magazine, and Glamour all had headlines about the “very demure, very mindful” trend.
In explaining the trend, Glamour stated, “Yes, demure means “reserved, modest, and shy,” but, no, this isn’t a Bridgerton-inspired or trad wife-coded trend promoting ladylike behaviour. It’s … well … just a silly joke.”
RollingStone’s headline read, ‘Demure: TikTok’s Phrase Of The Month, Explained’ and the article stated that, “while demure’s definition often involves modesty, piety, or being reserved, Lebron’s version of demure is about being cutesy, respectable, and chill”.
Noteworthy is that not all TikTokers embraced it. One Reddit user stated, “ ‘Very demure, very mindful’. I am going to scream and throw things if I see this mindless phrase one more time. It has filtered so far down so quickly.”
Dictionary.com, which provided a shortlist of possible winning words, explained that the Word of the Year reflects more than mere popularity. “It reveals the stories we tell about ourselves and how we’ve changed over the year. And for these reasons, Dictionary.com’s 2024 Word of the Year is demure.”
Sharing how the word was chosen, the platform noted that their lexicographers used an analysis process that involved of huge chunks of data “including newsworthy headlines, trends on social media, search engine results, and more to identify words that made an impact on our conversations, online and in the real world”.
This method, they said, showed “a meteoric rise” in the use of “demure” in 2024 – almost 1200 per cent increase in digital web media alone between January and the end of August.”
Other shortlisted words were brainrot, brat, extreme weather, weird, and midwest nice. The 2023 Word of the Year was hallucinate and in 2022, the word woman was crowned the winner.
English (US) ·