‘Rizz,’ ‘cheugy,’ and other terrible words we should leave behind in 2023

The new year is a time to shrug off those things that weighed us down in 2023.

Unfortunately, 2023 had a lot of terrible words and phrases. As we always do this time of year, let’s cast these terms into the past and never speak of them again in 2024.

Rizz. This word — slang for romantic appeal or charm — was destined for shame even before it ended up on both Oxford’s and Merriam-Webster’s word-of-the-year lists. I’ve written before about how such lists are clickbait nonsense, a pseudo-tradition that’s far beneath the dignity of the august institutions that typically publish them. Their inane selection of rizz — a word bound to be forgotten — feels like Borat trying to master “not” jokes: endeavoring to explain slang that wasn’t funny or interesting to begin with. This is Philadelphia, where our “rizz” is a crumb bum whose statue was secreted away in the dead of night in 2020. From now on, if anyone’s talking about “rizz,” Gonzo better be involved.

Not me [insert -ing phrase]. This construction — as in, “Not me belting along to the Philly Special Christmas Special album in the solace of my own home” — has become a bafflingly common way of saying, “I just did this.” Use instead: “I am.” More concise, more precise, likelier to form a complete sentence. Best of all, you don’t sound like you’re trying too hard to be clever.

Say no more. As opposed to most of the flash-in-the-pan entries on this list, this expression has been around for more than 400 years. Shakespeare used it. So did Monty Python. It’s had a good run. But not until the last decade or so has its more concise successor caught on: “Say less.” Say less was first cited in Urban Dictionary in 2011, but really took off after Dillon Francis and G-Eazy released their song “Say Less” in 2017. Google lookups have steadily increased ever since. Say less says more while you’re saying less. Say “Say no more” no more.

Periodt. Periodt, whose heyday was roughly 2019 to 2021, puts a period on the word period. When a period — or even the word period — isn’t enough, periodt adds even more emphasis. Unfortunately, it does so at the cost of cultural appropriation; as Indiana University linguist Michael Adams has said, periodt originated in Black gay slang, and somehow caught on. Regular old punctuation works really well. Use it — and avoid yet another misappropriation.

Cheugy. If you haven’t heard cheugy before, consider yourself lucky — and maybe a bit cheugy. It’s become popular on TikTok and among basic Gen Zers/millennials for whom basic was too basic a term. What is cheugy is highly subjective; to some in college and beyond, the word connotes that the things they liked in middle and high school are no longer cool. I mean, duh — that’s a lesson learned by anyone embarrassed by their own emo teen angst poetry. It’s been almost three years since the New York Times printed more than 1,100 words trying to explain what cheugy is. The word wasn’t happening then, and it’s still not happening now. Continually trying to make it happen just makes you look cheugy.

I’m in my ___ era. All eras now belong to Taylor Swift. None of them are yours anymore. Sorry.

A feature, not a bug. This expression has been around for a while, but it got an especially hard workout during the Donald Trump years. The cruelty of family separation at the border? Antisemitic messaging? Constant threats of violence against perceived enemies? A propensity to lie about everything? Naked self-dealing and corruption? All have been described as “a feature, not a bug” of our national slouching toward autocracy. Given current poll numbers, we have a lot of work to do in 2024 if we want to avoid a double feature. The economy is in surprisingly good shape, infrastructure is getting built, unemployment is the lowest it’s been in 50 years, and lots of student debt has been canceled. Joe Biden’s just gotta work on his rizz.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world. Send comments, questions, and concessive clauses to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.