”The TikTok Demise of Demure”

News Item, November 26, 2024

Demure’s current victory and success as Word of the Year - as designated by Dictionary.com” can largely be attributed to TikTok user Jools Lebron, better known as @joolieannie, who shared a slew of advice this year on how to appear “very demure” and “very mindful. This all perfectly describes this weeks them “REEDSY Prompt about “a character who’s lost....it’s meaning”

”The TikTok Demise of Demure”

It’s all a joke – all for fun - yet suddenly, somehow – that perfectly standard, non-exceptional, wall flower of a word, “demure” has been co-opted as the newest star in the ever-changing lexicon of the English language and deemed to be ’Word of the Year” (WOTY) by TikTok influencer, Jools LeBron.

Yes, typically, demure would stand there, practically and by definition, blouse buttoned to the neck, head down, blushing daintily, hands politely folded in front, in her ( according to the OED) “quiet and reserved and modest”, unshowy manner.

Except as of this week, she has changed, utterly. It feels like the future of this innocent adjective will be the subject of a combination of verbal cruelty the likes of which has not been seen since “Mean Girls” and Prom Night from “Carrie”

This year “demure” is purported to be dressed down - and as of November 2024, meaning it’s polar opposite. The chaste ‘demure’ is now shameless, narcissistic, vain, egotistical, drunk, brash and can’t remember how her key works in the lock of her apartment door when she comes stumbling in at all hours – accompanied by torrents of verbal abuse.

Sure, her antecedents are verging on the posh, perhaps even Ancien Régime royalty -- and she may have even been also known as demoré past part. of demorer  - i.e. remain, stay, [as DEMUR] infl. by OF meür f. L maturus ripe]. Quite the past - but that doesn’t mean this perfectly charming adjective needed to be turned – by TikTok fiat, into some baying at the moon drab!

Yes, this abruptly applied, super-popular, augmented usage, for one so identified with modesty, is all excitement, of course it is! Suddenly, the thrillingly new inamoratos, swains, suitors, burning flames, paramours are begging to be at her formerly diffident side, all being rakishly insistent that the “new demure’ reveal her slatternly charms.

It’s all fun and games now – but such titillating rough-house soon turns to tears – and who will be the only one weaving her way home - hair in disarray; blouse torn; skirt ripped; heel and heart broken? Not the erstwhile – and sated gallant! No – it will be the reinvented strumpet: the newly designated jade, ‘demure’.

Sic transit gloria mundi

Her fame, after being meteorically transient for the moment, her reputation soon in tatters – she will only be able to look on in sad recognition of other former ‘Words of the Year’ - their moment of luminous glory also now long past: each precipitously cast aside, disused, already forgotten in the endlessly anxious and changing glossary of a TikTok influencer’s next new thing clip bait – each and all consigned to OED’s Appendices of “yesterday’s lexis (archaic)”.

Here’s the last 5 years-worth of ‘Words of the Year’, with the one (WOTY) I vaguely recall hearing used most often at the time in parenthesis. 

  • rizz (deadname)

  • gaslighting (LGBTQIA)

  • vaccine (woke)

  • pandemic (Kraken)

  • they (egregious)

Perhaps you might recall some of these from their palmy days, when they too were stars – quite literally on the tip of everyone’s tongue. They were at every party, in attendance at each and all glittering gatherings where the cognoscenti congregated and conversed!

“Wow, that guy has no rizz whatsoever.

You got her number? W rizz!

Bruh, that girl has better rizz than I do

I’m gonna go rizz one of those girls.”

This brief collection – a mere half-decade old, surely rivals those inarticulate and halting words employed by many the greatest orators of our time. But neither the outraged Obama; nor the wartime resolve of Churchill; nor the declamations of freedom from Martin Luther King Jr. - neither they nor none of their ilk had any idea that the inclusion of the “Word of the Year” could have done so much more to vastly improve their spine-steeling oration to their nations and the world in its time of need.

“When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, ‘In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.’ Some chicken! Some rizz!” — Winston Churchill, 

Ottawa, Dec. 30, 1941

“You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens are gaslighted” 

— President Barack Obama, 

Stanford University on April 21, 2022

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the release of the Kracken!.

— Martin Luther King . Jr ,

Lincoln Memorial , Washington DC, August 28, 1963

With the exception of ‘rizz” - for all the additionally defined heft these current and former ’Words of the Year” (WOTY) designates are now freighted, they are (or were) all once normal English words found in anyone’s Merriam Webster – as is indeed this, the latest inclusion to wear the current laurels (“Laurel” 7th level:” WOTY in 2018). 

Plucked from the obscurity of the OED – exposed to the brutal glare of public acclaim, the popularity of the verbal duality of the ‘WOTY’ has the lifespan of a mayfly. They used to be decent, clean words; words you would be happy to employ; words you’d feel comfortable bringing home to introduce to the parents.

Now they are cast aside, abandoned and through no fault of their own. repudiated by the very social media agents that once granted them their fleeting fame.

Yet, there may still be hope for these forsaken collections of verbs, adjectives, nouns and adjectives, so that they may not find themselves relegated back to the pages of some unopened dictionary or referred to as “obscure” in an undistinguished, unseen, online urban lexicon.

If you could – as is customary at this time of year – find it in your heart to give generously, to me, personally, I promise that I will ensure these words find good homes; homes where they can once again become the very definition of their former and best selves; where they would be accorded, according to Roget’s, their proper dignity, pride, character, integrity, worthiness, probity, standing and rectitude.

And I’m “very mindful” that five bucks should cover it.

Thanks!