11 Buzzwords Of 2017 — Also, I’m Sorry For Saying The Term “Buzzwords”

Ratioed, podfasters, nameflamers, and soy boys.

1. Broem

2. Complicit

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When Gayle King asked Ivanka Trump back in April how she would respond to people who said she’s complicit in her father’s policies, her unsatisfying answer became a meme on the left. It spread to describe those who had turned a blind eye to sexual harassment. Dictionary.com named it its “word of the year,” which itself is part of a trend of online dictionaries stunting to be timely and woke online.

3. Exposed

A term used in stan Twitter that often goes along with “receipts” to show some wrongdoing by a celebrity. The usage is basically the same as its traditional meaning — to reveal something — but there’s been a noticeable uptick lately. When Kim Kardashian posted the videos of Kanye talking to Taylor Swift on the phone, that was the genre classic of “exposed.”

4. Milkshake Duck

The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist

Though the tweet — which describes the phenomenon of a newly viral celebrity almost instantly revealed to have something horrible in their past — was from 2016, Milkshake Duck solidified in 2017 as a household term (at least, in houses where people are on Twitter a lot) as more and more of these ducks lined up. It can be used as a noun or verb (“I can’t believe so-and-so Milkshake Duck’d), and came to a feverish crescendo at the end of the year with a viral video of a bullied child, who it was later discovered had a racist mother.

5. Nameflame

6. Podfasters

7. Ratioed

when i'm watching someone with a terrible take get Ratio'd.

“The ratio,” a buzzword first reported by Esquire, is used by people to describe times on Twitter where someone makes a bad tweet and it gets way more replies (usually by people telling them they suck) than it does retweets or faves. Here at BuzzFeed News, it wouldn’t be unusual in 2017 to overhear someone saying, “Did you see so-and-so is getting ratioed?” or “Wow, that tweet is getting ratioed hard.”

8. RompHim

9. Shitpost

I don't know how to interpret that Ajit Pai video other than as mocking the negative impact of his polices on ordin… https://t.co/6PEtVt5BbC

Shitposting has existed since the dawn of time, but in 2017 the term finally caught on with normies. Shitposting was originally a powerful tool of trolls, meant to cause mayhem and dissent. But it also was used to describe something meaningless: Eh, don’t take it seriously, it’s just shitposting. One could say that “shitposting” became the shitpost of 2017.

10. Soy boy

Shoutout to the Twitter staff. I dedicate my antisemitic tweets to this soyboy and the girl who looks triggered. I… https://t.co/hP5MtySxT5

The new term for liberal men used by the alt-right and their ilk. Somewhere between “cuck” and “pajama boy,” it’s a reference to a dubious scientific link between eating soy products and raised estrogen levels for men.

11. Thread

Thread alert: so I go on what I think might be a date with a guy my friends set me up on on my birthday (yes it's a bit hazy).

What we used to call a “tweetstorm” — the long, numbered messages broken over numbered tweets — is now a thread. The change from numbered tweetstorms to threaded ones is partly because Twitter made it so you can thread your own tweets by replying to yourself. Now it’s rolling out a new feature that will make it even easier to make threads.

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