As the year slouches toward its inevitable end, the Words of the Year as determined by the editors of various dictionaries continue to trickle out. This week the good folks at the Cambridge Dictionary have revealed their selection for the 2024 WOTY, which is “manifest.”
A quick check of my go-to dictionary, Merriam-Webster.com (sorry, Cambridge), shows that manifest is actually used as three parts of speech. The word’s original use was as an adjective that came from French and Latin, meaning “easily noticed or obvious.”
Probably the most popular use of manifest as an adjective is the phrase “manifest destiny,” which became well known during the administration of President James K. Polk way back in 1845.
According to the Smithsonian Institution, manifest destiny was “the philosophy describing the necessary expansion of the nation westward,” and was “the belief that it was our duty to settle the continent, conquer and prosper.”
Manifest is also frequently used as a transitive verb meaning “to make evident or certain by showing or displaying,” and as a noun that describes “a list of passengers or an invoice of cargo for a vehicle.”
“That’s all well and good,” I hear you saying (yes, I can hear into the future), “but what does all that have to do with those Cambridge people selecting manifest as its Word of the Year, especially when there are so many other wonderful and weird words from which to choose these days?”
Even the Cambridge lexicographers seemed to be surprised by the resurgence of a “fairly formal 600-year-old word” that would suddenly be looked up almost 130,000 times during the previous year.
If you had to guess why this was happening all of a sudden your first guess would probably be that social media had something to do with it — and you’d be right. Social media has a growing number of “manifesting influencers” who advocate “manifesting” or the use of “specific practices to focus your mind on something you want to try to make become a reality.”
For its part, Cambridge University Press & Assessment’s definition for this new way of using “manifest” is: “to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.”
Social psychology professor Dr. Sander van der Linden from the University of Cambridge has compared manifesting to the simple act of positive thinking. In that case, you’d do well to seek out a copy of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 book “The Power of Positive Thinking.”
Among the runners-up for Cambridge Dictionary’s WOTY is “resilience,” which got even more lookups (152,000) than maifest, but was passed over because “there is not much to say about it linguistically.”
Another also-ran was “ecotarian,” or one who embraces the “growing movement toward environmentally conscious living.”
And of course there was also the negative word “brat,” which as everyone knows was flipped to have a generally positive meaning. It ended up getting the boot, the editors said, because flipping the meaning of a word really isn’t all that uncommon. That and the fact that probably everybody’s sick of it by now.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
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