It never ceases to amaze how much influence moronic guys have on the world. The suffix “-maxxing,” popularized by Clavicular—a guy famous for being unpleasant —has saturated the lexicon. “-maxxing” has been around for a while in some form or another, but like most Gen Z trends, it’s a repackaged version of an old thing, with traces of a term dating back nearly 40 years.

But as they say, it takes years of work to become an overnight success, and that’s why “maxxing” is Dictionary.com’s 2026 Word of the Year.  

According to Dictionary.com data, usage of the term exploded in digital media by August 2026, appearing nearly 19 times more often than its 2025 monthly average. A lot of modern usage got its start on 4chan, the internet’s fetid asshole, where it was a part of incel slang, and just yesterday I saw McDonald’s using the term “Bag Maxxing” to promote their annual Monopoly game. What was once a term for mentally ill internet boys is now a corporate slogan to promote a tie-in Monopoly game.

This world is broken beyond repair.

‘Maxxing’ Is Dictionary.com’s 2026 Word of the Year. May God Have Mercy on Us All.

It’s a fitting term for the era, one in which it feels like so many aspects of life are solved problems, or at least sold as such, in that we’ve reached the limit of what we currently can do, and now we’re just eking out as much maximization around the margins as we can while we wait for truly groundbreaking non-AI innovations to shake up how we fundamentally do things.

Now, everyone is slapping the suffix onto everything to sound cooler. Fitness influencers are proteinmaxxing, sleepy people are sleepmaxxing, corporations are tokenmaxxing AI, and the Pentagon unironically bragged about “lethalitymaxxing” because, I reiterate, the world is broken beyond repair.

The post The 2026 Word of the Year Is Officially Here, and It’s Peak Internet Brain Rot appeared first on vice.

Before his 1945 novella Animal Farm made him famous, George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. The 1984 author’s stint didn’t last long, however, as he was seriously injured near Huesca after just 10 days on the front lines. At 5 a.m. on the morning of May 20, 1937, Orwell was struck by a sniper’s bullet mid-sentence while speaking with some other soldiers. “This was always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky,” he explained in his memoir Homage to Catalonia.

In that moment, Orwell recalled feeling as though he’d been at the center of an explosion. “There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock—no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electrical terminal,” he wrote of the incident. While Orwell was conscious of being hurt and knew he’d gotten hit somewhere in the front of his body, it was only when he managed to faintly squeak out an inquiry that he found out how bad things were. “As they lifted me up a lot of blood poured out of my mouth, and I heard a Spaniard behind me say that the bullet had gone clean through my neck,” the novelist revealed.

Before Writing ‘1984,’ George Orwell Nearly Died FROM a Sniper ATTACK

Harry Milton, who assisted Orwell following the attack, attributed the shooting to Orwell’s height—he was 6’2”—and his reckless habit of poking his head out in view of enemy soldiers. “I heard the crisp sound of a high-velocity shot and Orwell [toppled] over. He landed on his back,” Milton remembered. From there, Milton administered first aid as Orwell waited to be transported to a local hospital. It wouldn’t be until eight or nine days later that his wound was finally examined by a doctor.

What the doctor discovered was that the 7mm copper-plated bullet had passed through Orwell’s neck between the trachea and the carotid artery, paralyzing one of his vocal chords in the process. He was then “cheerfully” informed that he’d never get his voice back. That didn’t end up being the case, though, as Orwell reported that he could speak almost normally again by the end of that July. “No one I met at this time—doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients—failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives is the luckiest creature alive,” he recounted.

The post George Orwell Was Once Shot Through the Throat by a Sniper and Somehow Survived appeared first on VICE.