After garnering 93% of a public vote, ‘goblin-mode’ was crowned Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year. The vote saw three lakh English-speaking individuals participate, choosing between ‘goblin-mode’, ‘metaverse’ and ‘#IStandWith’ over the last two weeks, finally zeroing in on ‘goblin-mode’ as the successor to 2021’s ‘vax’.
If you’re wondering what ‘goblin-mode’ means, chances are you’ve activated it at some point (possibly for longer than you’d care to admit!) during the pandemic. Remember when you self-appointed yourself as the couch potato, binge-watching re-runs of The Office and Modern Family? Or, when you demolished whole pints of ice cream at 3 am? Or when weeks went by and you did absolutely nothing that could be considered productive? Well, that was you in ‘goblin-mode’, a mode never to be confused with rock bottom.
The official Oxford Dictionary defines the word as, ‘a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations’, and it sounds awfully appealing.
