Gee whiz! ‘Rizz’ is the fizz in new word biz | Sam Venable

Sam Venable
·2 min read

Dang. What a letdown. I thought I was a wordsmithing wizard, proudly poised on the cutting edge of modern language.

Turns out I ain’t nothin’ but a geezerly goof whose edge is duller than a Mike Pence speech.

This embarrassing epiphany occurred recently when Oxford University Press selected “rizz” as Word of the Year for 2023.

Oxford University Press has named “rizz" as its Word of the Year, highlighting the popularity of a term used by Generation Z to describe someone’s ability to attract or seduce another person.
Oxford University Press has named “rizz" as its Word of the Year, highlighting the popularity of a term used by Generation Z to describe someone’s ability to attract or seduce another person.

“Why, hale far!” I said to myself upon hearing the announcement. “Me and ever’ other son or daughter of Southern Appalachia knows what ‘rizz’ means. It’s what the sun did this mornin’ and ever’ mornin’ since Adam and Eve wore fig leaves: It rizz in the east.”

Uh, not quite. At least to hear the hoity-toities at Oxford University tell it.

According to them, “rizz” is a “slang term that refers to someone’s ability to attract a romantic partner.” It is believed to be short for “charisma” and “encompasses swagger, game and style,” says a guy named Casper Grathwohl.

(I didn’t make that up, although it sounds like his folks were drinking heavily when they named their son after a cartoon ghost. Then again, with a family handle like Grathwohl, anything’s possible. But I digress.)

Casper G. is president of Oxford Languages, a company in England. Its main business is publishing the Oxford English Dictionary, a tome containing more than 600,000 entries and alleged to be the world’s authority on English words.

(Pfft! Maybe that’s the case in courtrooms and other highbrow venues. But anybody from these parts knows the purest mother tongue can only be found in “How to Tawlk and Rite Good: A guide to the language of Southern Appalachia”— a cheap pamphlet compiled, and shamelessly hustled, by some rube who writes a Sunday column for the Knoxville News Sentinel. I digress once more.)

“Rizz” topped eight other candidates for Word of the Year, including “situationship,” “parasocial” and “de-influencing.”

“Situationship” and “parasocial” also are related to “romantic or sexual relationships,” leading me to think the folks at Oxford University spend more time reading romance novels than publishing dictionaries.

But I did recognize, and identify with, “de-influencing,” aka the practice of discouraging people from doing something.

One night many years ago, Ken Guidry and I were drinking beer in a bar in rural Cameron Parish, Lousiana. The mood was festive. So festive that I attempted to sing aloud with the zydeco band on stage. Not wise.

Ken de-influenced the crowd by tossing the bartender a twenty, grabbing my arm and cutting a trail for the door.

Thank goodness he did. Otherwise, a knot might’ve rizz up on my head.

Sam Venable’s column appears every Sunday. Contact him at sam.venable@outlook.com.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Gee whiz! ‘Rizz’ is the fizz in new word biz | Sam Venable