The album title Sting rejected.

Sadly, the word Ponderosity didn’t make it to the 2024 word of the year shortlist. Not even the long list to be honest. Several of the recent Cambridge Dictionary words of the year have been borrowed from psychiatry, e.g. paranoid (2016), nomophobia (2018), perseverance (2021) and hallucinate (2023). But this year they chose ‘manifest’. To some extent the meaning of manifest is to do with self actualisation, but the word could also be claimed by a cruise ship or airline crew or indeed Netflix.

For people who prefer a bit of light etymology to catching up with the new season of Squid Game, here’s the case for Ponderosity for word of the year ‘25 should my campaign be successful.

Ponderosity derives from a latin word Ponderosus meaning weighty. Veteran TV watchers will remember the ranch was called Ponderosa in the long running show Bonanza. That name comes from a type of pine tree though. Also Ponderosa is a bar near Dungiven, NI, but that is another red herring. For completeness, Ponderosa was also the HQ of British part time TV private detective Boon, but that’s getting too much into the small print.

Brat, Polarization, Brain Rot and Enshittification are the other words of the year 2024, selected by the various dictionaries. These are new words for already very well described entities. To some extent they subsume each other and derive from the laws of entropy. 

Enshittification is a luxury word, being a syllable 6 pack. It’s a useful verb in the light of recent events and might also be useful to gastroenterologists. But I would argue it’s taken as read. I keep pointing out that Blur’s Modern Life is Rubbish is over 30 years old. Comparing and contrasting to the D:ream song, released the same year, 1993, ‘things can only get better’. Who was right?

Ponderosity has always been overshadowed by its heftier sibling word, Ponderousness. It’s not quite onomatopoeia, but the extra syllable adds a much needed sense of dead weight.

Ponderosity is of interest to psychiatrists in several ways. The psychiatry of slowness crosses several domains, including catatonia, psychomotor retardation, obsessional compulsive slowness, chronic fatigue and bradykinesia. Which means it can be associated with Psychosis, Depression, Anxiety or Organic types of illness. 

More frequently though Ponderosity seems to be associated with certain systems and occupational groups, not to mention shops and cafes. Ponderosity is a cardinal feature of religious practitioners and politicians, and it crops up a lot in bureaucratic systems like NHS procurement and criminal justice.

I think I first became averse to Ponderosity at catholic church services in the late sixties. Instead of making hay with the new found freedoms following Vatican 2, the church, at least in England, instead of putting on floral shirts and flares, decided to exacerbate its worst traits and pump up the stodge to new levels.

In particular people were made to sing a lot of the prayers and several hymns were inserted. The priest seemed to have to sit down and do nothing for minutes at a time, as though he were exhausted by elevating the host or giving out communion. Homilies were expanded and padded out with what we would now call bloatware.

The whole effect for a young child was like watching – a hundred times over – a movie they never liked in the first place (yes, like, Blade Runner 2049). Obviously that movie isn’t suitable for children (nor adults). 

Any sense of spirituality or life enhancement was sucked out of the room as though a nuclear Dyson had been connected to the organ pipes.

(I’d add that Ponderosity was overshadowed by far more significant problems within the church, but that’s another story).

An aversion to ponderosity is a big problem for a psychiatrist. We are supposed to listen a lot and not talk much. (CBT excepted). During the decades I spent in clinical practice listening to people, one of the biggest problems I had was listening patiently. Admittedly in those days, as now, there were far more patients crammed into time slots than could feasibly be listened to as patiently as they should have expected. 

Gradually I became more patient I think, but probably nowhere as near as patient as my social work colleagues. Social workers are the most patient people outside of monasteries. 

Peak ponderosity can be found at social services case conferences. Social work bosses haven’t usually seen the film Interstellar, so they are unaware that time moves much more slowly within the black holes of local government buildings. It’s true that the practice of inviting large disparate family groups can result in moments of tension worthy of Eastenders, with shouting and even scuffles breaking out – I have seen these – but there is seldom a ‘bullet time moment’ where everything freezes and fate hangs on a thread.

Everyone has to attend child protection training on a regular basis and it’s absolute heresy to criticise these meetings, which are vital to child safety, but doctors in particular tend to send their apologies at the last minute, having been called away urgently for hairdressing emergencies. 

I had experience of Ponderosity in the criminal justice system when I did jury service for 2 weeks. Nothing at all happened in week one. There was an interesting trial in week 2 but it unfolded much more slowly than in the Lincoln Lawyer. Also everyone seemed to come up from London for each day and take two hour lunch breaks.

Perhaps this was a glimpse of what right wing politicians call ‘The Blob’.

Again, movie fans will know that The Blob was a 1958 sci fi horror thriller starring the young Steve McQueen, remade in 1988 too. 

In politics ‘the blob’ is used to describe civil servants and other officials who act like Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army, to throw cold water on hot-headed schemes. 

Liz Truss expanded the cohort to include corporate executives and probably the man who periodically examines the fire extinguishers and puts a little sticker on them saying ‘checked’.

“I think the Blob describes (something) wider than just the government,” she told a Wall St documentary.

“It’s a groupthink shared by senior media executives, senior corporate executives (and) civil servants. Wouldn’t it be better if experts and technocrats were running everything?’.

More recently the ‘new bureaucratic class’ has been expanded to include ‘private-sector compliance lawyers, human-resources staff, university administrators, NGO workers and green lobbyists’.

I think we need these people, as we need the fire extinguisher check man. And much as we need social services’ case conferences, people who listen and Sergeant Wilson. 

The new bureaucratic class are named in a Conservative pamphlet ‘Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class’. 

It’s a 22000 word pamphlet. I’d say it was manifest, polarizing, probably brat, brain rot for sure and most definitely enshittified. But is it ponderous enough? It’s not stated who wrote the pamphlet, but it is hinted that there are many more pamphlets in the pipeline. And this one will be expanded into a book, so yes, more ponderosity is on the way, like a slow train coming.

Happy New Year.