Photo by Taylor Wright on Unsplash
Should we be worried about Rizz? I’m afraid so.
As if there weren’t enough to worry about — climate disaster, endless wars, A.I., fragile democracies — along comes rizz.
Rizz is the newly-crowned Oxford Word of the Year, which is a Very Big Deal. I mean, it won out over three other finalists — Swiftie, prompt, and situationship. I could’ve dealt with prompt. Even though I’ve always tried to be prompt and am thus a little miffed about AI re-purposing a perfectly good word. (I could not have dealth with situationship, sorry.)
Rizz, though? Now that it’s THE word, I am considering how it and I can get along. Officially it means “style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner;” unofficially it means all of the above, or, in general, maybe, pizazz — although pizazz never got to be Word of the Year when it slid into the lexicon a century or so ago.
Photo by Juan Camilo Navia on Unsplash
Rizz. Apparently if you have it everybody knows. If you don’t have it, as I secretly fear may be my bottom-line situationship, what can you do? (Situationship, in case you’re over 30, is when the relationship you’re in is not quite a real relationship, or at least you’re not having sex with whomever or whatever else you’re relating to. It’s complicated.)
The Oxford people tell us that rizz is “believed to be a shortened form of the word ‘charisma’, taken from the middle part of the word.” Charisma, according to Wikipedia, “is a personal quality of presence or charm that others find compelling. Scholars in sociology, political science, psychology, and management reserve the term for a type of leadership seen as extraordinary.”
Fleetingly, now and then I might have had some charisma. I like to think I’ve been influential in a cause or two, if not identifiably charismatic. But even that wouldn’t help when it comes to rizzhood.
You can’t, in short, rizz your way into being rizz, even if the new Word of the Year is both a noun and a verb. Rizz, it seems, just iz.
May your new year overflow with ripples of rizz.