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I was fascinated this week by the unveiling of the Macquarie Dictionary Word of 2024.
Enshittification is perfectly crafted to match our times.
It is dismissive, slightly pretentious, sets a scatological word within a scientific frame and turns worthless behaviour into a technological process.
The naming of the freshly coined word of the year made me wonder about the fate of unused words.
Should we also have a yearly burial service for words that have recently died?
One such rarely used word is classy.
It differs from the New Word for 2024 in its construction. It is laudatory, domesticates a word in common use, and lets it stand for itself without prompting.
Its meaning, however, is also ultimately defined by the examples it is used to describe.
- Classy is when Sydney Carton sacrifices his life for his friend in A Tale of Two Cities.
- Classy is when, in ‘the mile race of the century’, John Landy stops to help up Ron Clarke.
- Classy is when Weary Dunlop, having tirelessly helped and stood up for ill and injured prisoners of war, forgives his captors.
Classy, of course, is derived from class.
It connotes First Class, and also Upper Class.
It embraces the self-sacrificing, understated, behaviour expected of the Upper Class and attributed to them as typical in books and comics. On Scott’s Expedition to the South Pole, for example, Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates steps out ‘for a while’ from his tent in order to give his companions a better chance of living.
The association with Class has contributed to the decommissioning of classy.
As journalists focused on the pretensions and hypocrisy of the Upper Classes and on the gap between their representation in popular literature and their behaviour, class became a pejorative word and classy was also tainted.
Whether society is the better for the dethroning of classy and the coronation of enshittification, I leave for you to decide.
It is the nature of Stray Thoughts to conclude with a question: Are there other once popular and now little-used words whose passing you regret?
- Andrew Hamilton SJ is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
- First published in Eureka Street. Published with the writer’s permission.
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