You can call off the search now – I’ve resurfaced. Yeah, as if you were worried …
I’ve had a pleasingly full work diary over the past few months, so I feel the need to reconnect with the world beyond my desk and catch up with what’s lately been keeping people in publishing up at night (or making them smile) – and the turn of the year is a good place to start.
Who else was surprised/disappointed by the 2025 Oxford University Press Word of the Year (https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/)? Aside from ‘rage bait’ being two words, it takes me to a pretty dark place, while June Casagrande has a more sanguine view (https://www.grammarunderground.com/oxfords-word-of-the-year-rage-bait.html).
In the same vein, our transatlantic language connections can spark a debate over the choice of ‘zee’ (as in ‘Gen Z’) as the US-to-UK Word of the Year (https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2025/12/us-to-uk-word-of-year-2025-zee.html) and ‘fiddly’ as the UK-to-US Word of the Year (https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2025/12/uk-to-us-word-of-year-2025-fiddly.html) for 2025. I confess I pull a face when anyone says ‘zee’ instead of ‘zed’. You say ‘to-may-to’, and I say ‘to-mar-to’. I’m happy that ‘fiddly’ has found the limelight – perfect for me or anyone else with long fingernails texting a friend after three glasses of Merlot.
On a more serious level, the disappearance of the Federal Plain Language Guidelines (FPLG) from plainlanguage.gov has not gone unnoticed (https://centerforplainlanguage.org/the-federal-plain-language-guidelines-are-missing/), and raises questions about what this means for clearly communicating scientific facts to the public. I think we can all guess why the FPLG has vanished and where all this is heading.
Let’s hope that sanity in the USA can be restored by a bill for the proposed reintroduction of the Right to Read Act, to uphold support and investment for student literacy and library resources and combat the banning of books in the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free. After recently seeing the film ‘The Librarians’ (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002kkmj/storyville-the-librarians), this bill is needed now more than ever.
Finally, a plea for quality over quantity in open-access publishing is the main thrust in the post by Mandy Hill, the Managing Director of Cambridge University Press, on The Scholarly Kitchen (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/12/11/guest-post-academic-publishing-is-not-fit-for-the-future-if-we-dont-act-now-the-vital-role-research-plays-in-society-is-at-risk/). I agree with her argument that there is too much material for publishing processes and workflows to handle in their current form, and the path of least resistance and greatest incentive is being followed too often. Her proposed solutions are good ones, but are there too many vested interests to allow for such wholesale change?
Sounds like a fiddly problem to me – we’d better let Gen Z handle it.