Planet Business: Some phrases that rose to prominence in 2024 couldn't be unheard. QuitTok: why not celebrate ditching the job you hate by uploading a video of the special moment to TikTok? Photograph: Richard Vogel/APIf something has the suffix “-coded”, it essentially means it has those traits. Not bothering to take your dressing gown off for the work Teams call? That’s so burnout-coded. Queuing for drinks in a line that’s perpendicular to the bar? That’s Gen Z-coded.
“The lookalike contests are so Great Depression era coded,” posted writer Jeremy O. Harris in one great example of the genre. Ending sentences with the word coded? Very 2024-coded.Deserving of its place on the Oxford words of the year shortlist if not necessarily a shoo-in for all bookshelves was romantasy. This portmanteau of romance and fantasy is underpinned by a bona fide commercial trend: authors of steamy, otherworldly stories suddenly selling a bucketload of books. Time to stop being coy and put the one true ring on it: sexy elves are the hot new thing in the publishing industry. In this subgenre, as in real life, finding a handsome dragon who loves and respects you is bound to be an epic quest.Fiction to look out for in 2025: From Eimear McBride to Ben OkriIn the television streaming business, unrenewed is the new cancelled. It’s a kinder way of saying “that’s all, folks”, though it may also be a more accurate one in cases where a show works perfectly fine as a one-and-done series and wasn’t designed to be a “returnable” anyway. The term has gained traction since the pandemic sparked an “unrenewal wave”, with pullbacks in spending across the industry in 2023 and 2024 leaving more shows struggling to avoid being unrenewed. It’s when people start using it to describe the status of their relationships with friends and partners that we’ll know it’s really taken of