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Students in a 200-level linguistics course have “locked in” on this year’s submissions for the American Dialect Society Word of the Year, with a slang-heavy list of entries that have been amplified and boosted by social media.

“Lock in,” meaning to focus, was on the list that was considered when the society chose a winner at its meeting in Philadelphia from January 9–12. While it didn’t win the word of the year, it did win the category of “Most Useful” word of 2024.

Last year’s ADS winner was “enshittification,” a term used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow to describe how digital platforms worsen over time.

Some years, the submissions are more sober, such as in 2020, when words focused on the emerging pandemic.

Entries from TCNJ have made the finals of the generally lighthearted word competition during two recent years, indicating that students have their “finger on the pulse of linguistic innovation,” said Felicia Steele, who chairs the English department.

Students in Steele’s fall LNG 202, Structure and History of the English Language, have participated in the exercise for several years. This year’s list includes the straight-out-of-social-media “brat” to convey confidence, and “demure,” suggesting class, elegance, and refinement. Both words enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame last summer, and “brat” won in the “Most Fun While it Lasted” category for 2024.

Matthew McGrath ’26 submitted “lawfare.” The term has been around for a while, and it describes using the levers of the law to attack opponents and gain momentum during the recent political season.

“It was a word I encountered a lot while watching the news,” said McGrath, who noted that participating in the word-of-the-year application process touched on many of the concepts he learned in class.

Likewise, Gianna Panei ’29 said the words selection was a fun way to end a challenging class. She said a good number of the words or phrases are in her routine vocabulary. “I use ‘crash out’ a lot,” she said, referring to a term used for a breakdown.

Steele said she was partial to femininomenon — a blend of feminine and phenomenon popularized by singer/songwriter Chappell Roan.

Others on the list submitted by TCNJ students include:

• aura: a quality that can be gained or lost; derived from video gaming
• bet: an affirmative, “Are you going to the party?” “Bet.”
• big back: gluttonous consumption
• brainrot: deterioration of mental or intellectual state
• cap: lie
• looksmaxxing, improving one’s appearance
• lore or lore-drop: personal history
• mewing: creating a “pout-like” expression
• tweaking: anxious and frantic behavior
• unc: derisive term of address to older peer

“Brainrot” won the category of “Digital Word of the Year.”

See the 2024 Word of the Year and other category winners, learn more about the ADS, and see lists of past Word of the Year submissions on the American Dialect Society’s website.

— Patricia Alex

As a kid, Nick Battista wasn’t much of a swimmer.

Growing up outside of Buffalo, New York, he loved going to the aquarium and admiring his grandmother’s fish tanks, but on trips to the beach, a fear of sharks kept him from venturing into the water.

That changed during the last year of his PhD in mathematics where he studied the fluid dynamics at play in the development of the human heart. His adviser encouraged him to join her in taking up scuba diving so they could draw inspiration from nature and study how fluid dynamics affected other animals.

Battista is now an associate professor of mathematics at TCNJ, and he visits the Florida Keys twice a year to dive with his research collaborators, including his former advisor. There’s now even more diving in their future, as Battista has secured a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation to develop new computational methods to understand predator-prey interactions underwater.

The three-year, $124,000 grant will fund field studies and quantitative analysis of how cnidarians (a branch of the animal kingdom that includes jellyfish and coral) are affected by fluid dynamics in their attempts to capture the plankton they eat — and how those interactions look from the prey’s perspective.

“We’re still learning things from animals all the time”, Battista says. “Imagine a jellyfish expanding and contracting to swim. It seems like a relatively simple process, but there’s some really interesting physics going on.”

Using a combination of calculus, geometry, differential equations, and machine learning — and the biological validation offered by observing sea creatures in their natural habitats — Battista and his colleagues will seek to understand how animals maneuver through water to achieve their goals, whether that means capture or escape.

He plans to work with undergraduates from TCNJ’s School of Science and the School of Engineering on some of the mathematical modeling that undergirds this multidisciplinary research. And although the grant emphasizes the study of aquatic life, it will also support the development of new mathematical approaches that could expand into other arenas, just as Battista’s study of cardiovascular dynamics eventually led him to the sea.

“A beautiful thing about math,” he says, “is that the same methods we’re creating to study how animals swim and interact can be used for completely different applications in engineering or medicine, too.”

— Ben Seal, with reporting by Emily W. Dodd ’03