Oh, how wonderful are the days ahead of us! The possibilities, the surprises, the unexpected pleasures that’ll grace our life. Yes, 2025 will be a fantastic year.
Wait, what? 2025 is gone and been consigned to the dustbin of history? There’ll never be a 2025 again no matter how hard we beg or pray? How can that be? Who can I complain to? And why does this seem to happen every year?
Just when I thought I finally got the hang of 2025, it’s gone. Somebody snatched it away from me, and threw me 2026, when I’ve to do it all over again. And all this seems to be happening with increasing speed and brutality. You can almost say it’s an annual event.
In one sense 2025 was quite a significant year for me. It’s been 50 years since I left school after completing the Malaysian Certificate of Education, or MCE, the English-medium version of the Form Five school exam.
Half a century is both a very long time and also a blur. Within those years my parents passed away, I started working and retired, and I got married and became a parent. Now my kids are themselves in their 30s, with a couple pushing to break into the 40s soon enough.
Pass the word
How would you describe the year 2025 in one word? Was there a word that kept bugging you the entire year, or did one spring up as you look back at the days that have just passed?
Is that word printable and acceptable to the average Malaysian? More importantly, is it also acceptable to the guy in the basement of some government ministry armed with a big red pen and a blank warrant waiting to protect us from indecency?
It turns out dictionaries love to choose a “word of the year” as the year comes to an end. It’s a long tradition much valued by the lexicographers who create these dictionaries who want to prove they’re still relevant and cool in today’s world.
Such words are generally not chosen just because they were invented or occurred the most in that year, though that may very well be the case, too. Rather, they’re words that best seem to reflect the year, in good or bad ways.
In other words, they’re words that vibed the most with us and the days we went through in that year. Unsurprisingly enough, “vibe coding” is one of those chosen as a word of the year for 2025.
Name of the game
It would’ve been an easy job if the word of the year can include people’s names. “Trump” would win by a long mile in every single corner of the world.
In Malaysia, PMX would be our choice for word of the year, even if PMX is not strictly a name, however cool it might sound, especially given that PMIX or PMXI, which precede and succeed PMX, sounds more like a serious medical condition than anything cool or vibing.
And while we’re on Roman numerals – apparently these were gifts to the Romans from an ancient Malay kingdom – and since PMM or PMD or PMC or even PML are way ahead in the future, it looks like PMX will keep the title of being the coolest for quite a while yet.
PMX is also “AI”, one of the most common words of 2025. AI, though not the PMX variety, gave rise to many of the words of the year, while “AI ” itself may win word of the decade, or even of the century assuming AI allows us to complete it, if the Matrix movies are to be believed.
What comes close to dethroning PMX as Malaysia’s word of the year? 1MDB made a late run in 2025, but by then most people had gone on holiday and weren’t paying attention any more.
1MDB and another strong contender – Najib – regrouped as a team again and took on the TAG team, or Team AG. They played multiple rounds in the courts but to no avail. It’s clear Malaysians have moved on and the words 1MDB and Najib have lost their appeal.
Tireless immortal
Madani made a sporadic attempt to make itself lovable or at least memorable. It stalemated with Vision2020 at times during the year, for the simple reason that Vision2020 was being pushed by a tireless Malaysian immortal who was himself PMIV and PMVII earlier.
So yes, Dr Mahathir Mohamad was also a strong runner-up for 2025’s word of the year, if for no other reason than proving that even a century isn’t enough time for him to disappear from Malaysia’s political landscape.
Well done Tun, and rest assured your name will be in the shortlist for word of the year for many more years to come.
A foreign publication has noted the Malaysian word of the year is actually “tax”.
That is so lame and lazy – they might as well say the Malaysian word of the year is actually “death”. Those’re the only two certainties in life, whether in 2025 or any other year you care to mention. This is so sloppy of them.
I give you my word
Of the many words of the year that surfaced as 2025 came to an end, my personal favourite is actually “slop”. Again, it’s another AI-inspired word, though neither PMX nor yours truly will accept any responsibility for this.
Slop has its usual meanings, as in liquid slopping over the edge of a container or somebody dressing poorly or generally anything of low quality. But in the age of AI, slop has taken one particular connotation and ran away with it.
Lately, slop has come to mean low-quality content produced in large quantities in everyday life by AI – by which I’m not referring to the PMX or myself, even if you may want to disagree with the last part.
We see slop everywhere, especially on social media, where there’s no risk in being stupid or deceitful or unoriginal. You would probably say politics has been like this since forever and you would be right, except that nowadays politicians are vastly outnumbered by social media users by orders of magnitude.
Given that many social media celebrities get into politics and many politicians feel they must be on social media, the chances of us being slapped with even more slop is very high, and increasing.
Looking ahead
But what are the chances of getting away from social media and politicians? Slim to none, I’d say. They have become as ubiquitous and inevitable as taxes and death.
So, in 2026 and probably beyond, be prepared to put up with more slop, whether produced by hallucinating (a previous word of the year) AI or by hallucinating politicians and social media celebrities.
Enjoy 2026, however sloppy it may be. And don’t blink, because before you know it it’s time to welcome 2027 already.
Editor’s note: “Slop” is the choice of Merriam-Webster and the Economist; “rage bait” the choice of Oxford University Press; “vibe coding” the choice of Collins Dictionary; and “parasocial” that of the Cambridge Dictionary.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.