Wednesday, December 6, 2023
Good afternoon, Before you opened this newsletter, did you know what “rizz” meant? I want an honest accounting. Email me at dylan.scott@vox.com — and tell the truth. Here’s the agenda today: UP FIRST: Rizz is the word of the year CATCH UP: US cultural institutions roiled by Israel-Hamas war —Dylan Scott, senior correspondent |
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Rizz, the 2023 word of the year, explained |
Getty Images/CSA Images RF |
“Rizz” is 2023’s word of the year, news sure to send legions of aging millennials spiraling into their midlife crises. I can’t say it any better than my colleague Constance Grady:
We aged, we decrepit, we ancients of the internet, we people over 30, hear my word and shudder, for the hour of our obsolescence is at hand. Oxford University Press has announced its word of the year for 2023. Beware, for the dread word of our doom and destruction is: “rizz.”
I am painfully aware that I’m past my prime as a digital citizen. I am of the generation of Vine, of Tumblr, of BuzzFeed quizzes. The modern world of TikTok and, yes, “rizz,” is foreign to me. Whereas I was once terminally online, conversant in every Weird Twitter account you could muster, I am now obsolete. It is a strange sensation, as part of the generation that helped blaze the trail on instant messenger and the idiosyncratic forums that predated Reddit. When did meme culture pass me by?
I joke to my wife sometimes that our three kids will never be able to comprehend that I can remember when my parents bought our first desktop computer. I remember the days of landline phones and they may never use one. Now I fear I may not understand a word they say once they reach middle school. But enough with my existential dread. You clicked on this email for one reason: What the hell is “rizz”?
At its essence, it’s an abbreviation of “charisma” that developed in Black culture (as so much mainstream American slang did). It is a noun and a verb. You can possess rizz, the quality of, for example, being able to charm a person you’re attracted to. You can also “rizz” someone, if you successfully flirt your way into a date/hook-up/etc. with that person. My generation would have spoken of having “game.” The kids these days have “rizz.” That’s the gist. But, as always with language, open up the etymology and things get more complicated. -
Oxford University Press was looking for a word that typifies our current moment. Last year, the institution decided the world was in “goblin mode” (a hedonistic disregard for social conventions). This year, we have “rizz.” In selecting its words of the year, the organization looks for a term that has newly entered the English language or grown in popularity, thereby “having potential as a term of lasting cultural significance or providing a snapshot of social history.”
- The original definition of rizz had more nuance. Twitch streamer Kai Cenat helped popularize the term and, in his usage, somebody has rizz or has rizzed not merely if they successfully seduce someone, but specifically if they have such charisma, such rizz that they can charm somebody who should be, looks-wise, out of their league.
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But over time, the word’s meaning has flattened, much to Cenat’s chagrin. He lamented that when the word went viral on TikTok, “they butchered that word. They killed it.” Nowadays, having rizz is more or less synonymous with having charisma or game, its former texture lost. This is the way language evolves.
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Rizz has already been coopted by celebs and brands. Actor Tom Holland’s claim that he possessed “limited” rizz sparked more popular interest in the term. Now Tinder is pledging to redesign its hook-up app with a “rizz-first” aesthetic, though God only knows what that means. Having now been granted the imprimatur of Oxford University Press, “rizz” is well on its way to being as thoroughly uncool as I am.
Read the rest of Constance’s wonderfully written explainer. |
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The Israel-Hamas war is tearing American cultural institutions apart |
America’s arts and literary worlds are in turmoil over the conflict in Gaza. Artists are pulling their work from exhibits, deemed to be too pro-Israel (or not pro-Israel enough). Book lectures are being postponed and even canceled. Protesters are showing up at museums to register their discontent.
While these developments may pale in importance compared to what’s happening on the ground in this war, their ubiquity reveals how deeply the conflict has penetrated our culture on the other side of the world. It is forcing the leaders of these cultural institutions to evaluate their role in a world in which it seems increasingly difficult to isolate arts and culture from politics and world events — and in which many question whether it is even desirable to do so.
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“The idea of the art gallery as some kind of special or isolated separate space is, I think, very out of fashion.”JJ Charlesworth, an art critic and editor at ArtReview magazine, told Vox’s Marin Cogan. Museums have been forced to confront the Me Too movement and the opioid epidemic in recent years, providing a forum for art engaging with those subjects but also wrestling with their role in, for example, granting cultural cachet to a family, such as the Sacklers, entrenched in the arts.
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Artists and museums find themselves at odds over the Israel-Hamas war. The board of a well-known German contemporary art exhibition resigned in solidarity with another member who was forced to resign for supporting the Palestinian-led BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement. The Chinese dissident and artist Ai Weiwei had his show at the Lisson Gallery in London canceled because of comments he made on social media about the Jewish community.
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People risk losing jobs and publicity; organizations risk losing financial and political support. The editor-in-chief of an arts magazine lost his job for calling Israel’s assault in Gaza “genocide,” as the publishers said his view did not represent those of the magazine as a whole. This is the central tension these organizations are trying to figure out how to resolve. The talent wants freedom to express themselves as they see fit, but the larger organization often has funders and board members to answer to who may be uncomfortable with those views.
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🗣️ “The FDA has a story and the story is: ‘We’re the FDA, we know what we’re doing. Trust us.’ … Anything that interferes with that story or criticizes that story is generally not welcome.” |
—Joe Graedon, co-founder of the People’s Pharmacy, a consumer health organization that publishes complaints about generics, on the agency’s obstruction of efforts to more thoroughly test generic medications. [Bloomberg] |
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The Taliban has launched an offensive against polio since retaking control of Afghanistan. The same group that once blocked immunization campaigns, helping to make their country one of only two in the world with endemic polio, is now undertaking a campaign to eradicate it. [Washington Post]
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“Nutrient collapse” may be making our food less healthy. Some studies have concluded our fruits and vegetables contain less iron, vitamins, and zinc than they did in the past, though those findings are far from universally agreed upon. But the yield from one specific agricultural field in Hertfordshire, England, where crops have been grown and meticulously analyzed for nearly 200 years, provides some of the best evidence that our food is not as nutritious as it used to be. [Chemistry World]
- Concrete jungles have more pollution. Engineers combined tree canopy data from Google and various socioeconomic indicators to make a striking discovery: The parts of the UK with less tree cover — those unnatural “concrete jungles” — have more pollution and poorer air quality. [BBC]
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