Like every year when December arrives, the editorial staff of La Vanguardia chooses what they consider to be the word that most significantly summarizes the year that is ending. This is an informationally relevant word, not a new word, a neologism. In this initiative of the Publishing section that began in 2013, this year, for the first time in the eleven calls, the same word in Spanish and Catalan has won: amnesty.
If the July elections had not disrupted Spanish politics in the way that Pedro Sánchez has done with his amnesty proposal, perhaps the winner would have been the phrase artificial intelligence, which in the English acronym, AI, has been the chosen by Collins dictionaries. But the Spanish political earthquake has marked a good part of 2023, which has its hours numbered.
In previous calls, words from the same information field did coincide, as happened in 2018 with feminism (women), or in 2020 with covid and confinement. But this year's unanimity is overwhelming and demonstrates the extent to which the amnesty has been a far-reaching information bomb.
Other related words have crept into the list of the most voted, such as lawfare, the judicial war, and putodefender, a foul and anecdotal word, which summarizes the mobilizations of the right and the extreme right in front of the PSOE headquarters in Madrid. And a little further down the Catalan list, a mediator appears.
There are also other areas of information that have deserved the synthesizing attention of the La Vanguardia editorial team in the 2023 call, such as the word drought, which has obtained quite a few votes in both languages. The serious threat of restrictions due to the lack of rain is evident in the state of the reservoirs, and links to one of the winners of 2019: climate emergency.
Now, how can you summarize everything that came after Luis Rubiales stole a kiss on Jennifer Hermoso's lips? The Spanish soccer team had just won the women's World Cup and the then president of the Soccer Federation kissed the player, and the editorial staff of La Vanguardia considered that piquito was the word that best summarized this entire unpleasant episode. of the machismo reigning in too many institutions.
In fifth position in both languages, the words that appear have to do with Israel's invasion of Gaza. In Spanish it is directly the place name, Gaza, while in Catalan the demonym, gazià / gaziana, has been chosen, an adjective that until now did not exist, which has unfortunately become necessary to talk about this war.
An unequal war that, for some journalists, is becoming a genocide, another word that appears in lower positions on the lists of the most voted words of the year. Just as this year Gaza was the chosen word, last year the winner in Catalan was Ukraine, precisely because of the Russian invasion that began then and still continues.
Other words that have been among the top ten are the PISA report, due to the catastrophic results; Barbenheimer, the acronym for the two opposing fashion films Barbie and Oppenheimer; and also ecoanxiety, chainsaw and totis.
