As every year when the month of December arrives, the editorial staff of La Vanguardia chooses what it considers to be the word that most meaningfully sums up the year that is ending. It is an informatively relevant word, not a new word, a neologism. In this initiative of the Edition section that began in 2013, this year, for the first time in the eleven calls, the same word in Catalan and Spanish has won: amnesty.
If the July elections had not upended Spanish politics in the way that Pedro Sánchez has done with his amnesty proposal, perhaps the winner would have been the phrase artificial intelligence, which in the form of its English acronym, AI , has been chosen by the Collins dictionaries. But the Spanish political earthquake has marked a large part of this 2023, whose hours are numbered.
In previous calls, words from the same information field did coincide, as happened in 2018 with women and feminism, or in 2020 with confinement and covid. But the unanimity this year is overwhelming and shows the extent to which the amnesty has been a long-range information bomb. In the list of the most voted, other related words have crept in, such as lawfare, the judicial war, and putodefender, a rude and anecdotal word, which summarizes the mobilizations of the right and the ultra-right in front of the headquarters of the PSOE in Madrid And a little further down the Catalan list, mediator appears.
There are also other areas of information that have merited the synthesizing attention of La Vanguardia’s editorial staff in the 2023 call, such as the word drought, which has received a lot of votes in both languages. The serious threat of restrictions due to the lack of rain is evident in the state of the reservoirs, and links to one of the winners of 2019: climate emergency.
Now, how can you sum up everything that came after Luis Rubiales stole a kiss on the lips from Jennifer Hermoso? The Spanish national football team had just won the Women’s World Cup and the then president of the Football Federation planted a kiss on the player, and the editors of La Vanguardia considered that piquito was the word that best summed up all this unpleasantness episode of masculinity reigning en masse in our institutions.
In fifth position in both languages, the words that appear have to do with Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In Spanish it is directly the toponym, Gaza, while in Catalan the gentilici has been chosen, gazià / gaziana, an adjective that did not exist until now, which has unfortunately become necessary to talk about this war. An unequal war that, for some journalists, is becoming a genocide, another word that appears in lower positions on the lists of the most voted words of the year. Just as Gaza was the chosen word this year, last year the winner in Catalan was Ukraine, precisely because of the Russian invasion that began then and is still ongoing.
Other words that have remained in the top ten of 2023 are PISA report, for this year’s catastrophic results; Barbenheimer, the acronym for the two opposite fashion films Barbie and Oppenheimer, and also ecoansiedad, chainsaw and totis.