We are still at the beginning of 2025, but Brendan O’Neill has already named his ‘most irritating phrase of the year’ – because everyone is now saying the Trump administration is a ‘vibe shift’. Since the start of the 1970s ‘vibe’ (as an abbreviation of ‘vibrations’) has been used to mean a feeling or attitude. In the famous courtroom scene in The Castle, Dennis Denuto is asked by the judge to give reasons supporting his plea and famously replies, ‘It’s the vibe of the thing, your Honour.’ Sometimes the word is used in the plural (as in ‘he was giving off bad vibes’). The Beach Boys used the word in full in their song ‘Good Vibrations’. In much the same way, London’s Financial Times referred to ‘the Trump vibe shift’. The New Statesman called Trump’s policy program ‘the Great American Vibe Shift’. Brendan O’Neill complains this makes Trump’s return to power sound like one type of fashionable pop music giving way to its successor. But, he argues, what has happened is ‘Not just a switcheroo in vibes’. Every so often there can be a major turning point in a culture and, instead of a trivial expression such as ‘vibe shift’, we should be looking to see if we’ve turned around at a major intersection. Perhaps populations have just stopped believing what the elite has been telling them for decades? People do eventually wake up to these things. So, is that what is happening now – rather than a simple ‘vibe shift’?

There are some new expressions that make my skin crawl. The latest of these is ‘dudebro’. Both bits of this portmanteau word are irritating in themselves: ‘bro’ (abbreviation of ‘brother’ is recorded in the Caribbean from the 1500s, but became cool in America only from 1975); ‘dude’ (recorded from 1877 as the label for a fashion-conscious man seems to be a small lexeme chopped out of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’). But why have they been put together? The online, hyper-hip, Urban Dictionary explains that ‘dudebro’ refers to ‘White suburban males, usually 16-25 years of age, hailing from anywhere, USA. Characterized by their love of college football, pickup trucks/SUVs, beer, cut off khaki cargo shorts, light pink polo brand shirts… and trucker hats. Dudebros are incredibly insecure in their manhood, which makes them: insanely jealous of their girlfriends, overly macho, and laughably homophobic. Currently, there is no cure for being a dudebro.’ Except to expunge this word from the English language. That might work.