This month, we’ve compiled a list of new terms which all fit in the theme of ways we talk about our negative emotions and relationships. Whether you’re fed up with being controlled by your almond mum, right in the thick of your Sunday scaries, dealing with grief brain through conversations with a deadbot, or need to crash out on your favourite social media platform, it’s worth reflecting on cultural creativity that continually updates the inventory of terms which we use to classify and understand our emotions. If we decide that one of these precisely captures the mood of 2025, it might end up as our Word of the Year.
almond mum
This term was coined in response to a viral moment on the TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, in which a mother advises her daughter, who is weak from hunger, to ‘have a couple of almonds, and chew them really well’. It captures a phenomenon which many people who were raised in the era of dieting will relate to, in which a child is forced to cope with their mother’s restrictive eating and generally pathological relationship with food. In many cases, the almond mum passes on these issues to their children, especially young women. To some, the idea of an almond mum is a self-aware joke about the #worstmumever, while for others it represents the way in which we trivialise the cultural epidemic of disordered eating.
Sunday scaries
Aka Sunday night blues. Yes, Monday is on its way. Friday’s finality has given way to Saturday’s slump and Sunday’s walk in the park. And now, it’s the eve of Monday and, with trepidation we might think to ourselves, if I make myself very small, maybe Monday won’t see me. We might feel the familiar tightening of the chest, the flood of thoughts that need to make their way onto the to-do list, or the flutter of half-baked worries about the project deadline. By any and all of these, we know that the Sunday scaries are, once again, upon us. Sometimes, the weekend just isn’t long enough, and a sense of anxiety about the coming week’s demands leaves us wishing for a day between Sunday and Monday.
grief brain
While grief brain may not be a technical term used in cognitive sciences, the phenomenon it describes is undoubtedly real. Many of us have experienced the feeling of our brains turning to mush when we are completely absorbed by the emotions associated with the death of a loved one. Like its far less sombre cousin baby brain, grief brain might cause us to forget why we entered a room, or realise that we’ve spent the last 15 minutes staring into space. Despite its dark subject matter, the editors at the Macquarie Dictionary feel that this is a worthy addition to our lexicon, because it carries a real sense of compassion for people who are going through this experience, and creates space and acceptance for people to function below their best while they work through their emotions.
deadbot
While the people who came up with the idea of grief brain exemplify some of the best of humanity, those who came up with the idea of a deadbot perhaps exemplify some of the most sadistic, or at the very least, misguided. The idea is to create an interactive digital representation of a deceased person using their digital history to train an AI chatbot. It is unclear whether this is intended to be used by the bereaved as a way to cope, or by advertising agencies to create personalised virtual ghosts to urge suffering people to become consumers. Either way, the thought makes us want to invent a time machine to stop this from happening.
crash out
No-one wants to crash their car, drop a favoured porcelain piece with an inevitably startling crash, or see their investments plunge in a stockmarket crash. While all these examples were meant to give you a quick overview, or one might even say a crash course, in the senses associated with crash, we’ve yet to cover its latest iteration. You might recognise it from its older sense, used in both sports (crashing out from the tennis tournament) and to describe exhausted sleep (after a long day, I want nothing more than to crash out on the couch). Nevertheless, to crash out has come to be associated with a sudden outburst of emotional overwhelm, often publicly.
We’ve covered some pretty hefty emotional terms this month. Do you think any of these words should make it to our Word of the Year watchlist?
