It being December, we’ve arrived at the calendrical moment when the world’s leading lexicographers traditionally toss up their Word of the Year for all of us to bat about.

Yes my friends, it’s the annual Word Nerd’s Holiday.

This year’s candidates include:

This certainly was the year in which AI slop entered mainstream culture, both as a term and in visual form. It’s not a bad choice. Cory Doctorow’s enshittification might be a close rival. Vibe coding is too tech-niche. But for my money the word that best captured the lived experience of 2025 was dominate.

As much as many might wish otherwise, Donald Trump dominated 2025. Which is exactly what he wanted. His cruel dominant-strongman style didn’t just permeate American politics. It changed our language.

America once extolled the virtues of competition and success. Not in 2025. This past year saw Donald Trump implement the Ricky Bobby rule: If you ain’t first you’re last.

We got a taste of it in Trump’s first artificial intelligence proclamation, an executive order issued three days into his term. “It is the policy of the United States,” he declared on Jan. 23, “to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.”

Suddenly it was no longer enough to merely succeed. The President declared that America’s AI industry must dominate the world or—we all know the subtext—China will dominate us!

Use of the word spread. Remember the once-worthy goal of American energy independence? Not good enough for Trump, who created a National Energy Dominance Council and proclaimed a National Energy Dominance Month.

In late July the White House issued its full AI Action Plan. Let me give you a complete summary of the plan: We intend to give tech companies everything they desire and more. Zero regulations, no protections, no accountability. Let ‘er rip, boys!

Trump doubled down on his desire for dominance in the Plan’s preamble:

Unquestioned, unchallenged global dominance. Our AI is first. The rest of y’all are last.

Dominate. It’s a word set apart from other traditional descriptors of success. Think of success itself. Or thrive. Or grow, prosper, flourish.

Do you know what those terms have in common? The inclusion of others.

Many can succeed. Many can thrive, prosper, flourish—even as they compete individually.

Only one can dominate. Unlike the other terms, the word contains within its skin the threatening muscles of power, force, and cruelty.

The dominant imposes his will upon weaker others. The dominant demands. Others comply—because they are powerless to do otherwise.

Saturday Night Live has pummeled Trump in its cold opens this season, but the show never quite caught 2025’s tone of dominance until last weekend when Colin Jost stepped out as Defense Secre—sorry, War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

It was a brilliant performance: A man drunk on his own power, murdering Venezuelans hither-thither, dominating all those beta cucks and loser nerds in the press corps. (Which at the Pentagon isn’t even a press corps anymore.)

Hegseth, who bows to no man in his MAGA suck-uppage, added to the trend earlier this year when he announced the Pentagon “will unleash American drone dominance” by bolstering the U.S. drone manufacturing base. Which essentially means a bunch of military contractors will retool the line to make drones. But really dominant drones.

I realized the language was shifting this past summer when I heard a local AM news radio reporter refer to a company “hoping to dominate” the passenger ferry industry with a new electric hydrofoil.

The boat in question was built by an Irish startup called Artemis Technologies. Artemis was testing its prototype on Puget Sound as a sales come-on. The company hopes to survive, sell a few boats, and perhaps one day turn a profit.

Dominate should have been nowhere near that story. Yet the reporter clearly thought it was the cool new way to say succeed.

Once upon a time Americans took a dim view of monopolies. Theodore Roosevelt, manliest of the Presidents, famously made his reputation as a trust-buster. Trusts were Gilded Age companies so dominant they destroyed their competitors and dictated prices.

Roosevelt broke them up because monopolies and near-monopolies are really bad things for consumers, workers, industries, economies, society, and entire nations—everyone except the very few mustacioed men in top hats and monocles who run the monopolies.

The tech critic Cory Doctorow, inventor of the term enshittification, recently pointed out that it’s a company’s market dominance and the lack of government anti-trust enforcement that leads a company to enshittify itself. This is a process in which, essentially, an originally great online product reaches a point of dominance where it no longer has to deliver terrific value or service because it’s become the only game in town. Enter Facebook, Google Search, and Twitter/X as Exhibits A, B, and C.

We could use another Teddy Roosevelt right about now, because we’re re-learning the hard lesson of the Gilded Age. Dominant monopolistic companies are losers for everyone except Elon and his tech bros.

Fans of Talladega Nights will recall that even Ricky Bobby faced a reckoning with his own faith in dominance. If you ain’t first, you’re last his father famously told the impressionable young Ricky. Years later his dad admitted he must’ve been drunk or high when he said it. “Because,” tells Ricky, “that doesn’t make any sense at all!”