Each year brings with it new slang. Take, for instance, some of the trending words and phrases from 2021: ”vaxxed,” “It’s giving…,” “…understood the assignment.” But this year, the most popular buzzwords, beloved by Gen Z especially, felt more loaded. “Nepo baby,” “gatekeeping,” “gaslighting”: These words were shorthands for something else, sure, but they were also useful terms for attacking or critiquing systems of power.
Nepo baby was undeniably the star of the year (even if the Oxford Dictionary decided to crown “Goblin Mode” instead). The first time I came across the label was this spring, during the buzzy and consistently viral second season of Euphoria. Someone online had just discovered that Maude Apatow, who stars in the series as Lexi, was the daughter of comedy heavyweight Judd Apatow and actor Leslie Mann. Apparently, a lot of other young people hadn’t known this, either. The tweet went viral, and from there arose a debate about whether Maude deserved her role in Euphoria, and then if any spawn of Hollywood professionals could ethically work in the industry. A list of nepo babies was made: Ben Platt, Lily Collins, Louisa Jacobson, and on and on. Every few weeks, social media users seemed to unearth a new actor with parents who worked in Hollywood, and become outraged that the world of film and TV—which only a few years ago reckoned with the explosive #MeToo movement and, after that, systemic racism—did not operate on virtuous meritocracy. The term did not live and die on the internet, either. Just this week, New York magazine released a cover story dedicated to the nepo babies of Hollywood.
My colleague Sarah Spellings, Vogue.com’s fashion news editor, views the recurring nepo baby debates as a reflection of how high-stakes and thorny topics can become on social media. “The chronically online see everything as A Big Deal,” she says. One example she points to: a discussion about whether liking or disliking kids is rooted in ableism. Everything is an issue. “So we see that reflected in our casual conversation and jokes.”
And in an era of fake news and seismic world events, the term “gaslighting”—referring to the “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts,” per Merriam Webster, which made “gaslighting” its word of the year—became more and more prominent in our everyday lexicon. “It means that more people than ever can now identify just what gaslighting is, the harm it causes, and call it out,” Claire Cohen wrote for Vogue. “That gaslighting is a word at all, let alone word of the year, is something to shout about.”
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