Many years ago, when I read Time magazine on a regular basis, I was attracted to an interesting chart that showed the evolution of “epic” slang terms. There on the printed page was a giant oval, spiraling outward from the year 1225 to the present, dotted with catchy “epic” words. So, when the chart fell out of an old journal recently, it got me thinking about the coming year 2026, and whether it would, by the end of this new year, take on the cover of 1849 when the word stunning hit the streets, or look more like the 1964 version of excellence, which was the adjective smokin’.
Indeed, where was 2026 going to fall on the spiral of the Jim-dandy exclamations? Would we settle for something slick and swell as we did in 1962 with “all that,” or go for broke with a solid neato from the1950’s? What’s your hyped-up word for the coming year?
Given that for me 2025 was the bomb (1973), meaning for me anyway, that the year blew up into a thousand pieces, I decided what I needed for this year might be a fresh word on the diagram of epic-ness, a word that could hold its own should sanity start to spiral. I had some conditions for my pick, but whatever I chose I knew it had to define my 2026 as a brand spanking new year. As I scanned the spiral of the past, I also wanted my phrase to be more inclusive than those of the past that seemed to favor some brand of spectacular achievement. Naturally we’d all love to be as fabulous as everything was in 1609 when that word went viral, or as stellar as 1883, but from what I could see from the chart, we had already lived a thousand years with words of impossibly high standards. I mean, who can keep fabulous going day after day? I wanted something from the fifth dimension, a solid, something all right, but with teeth.
Without further ado, I’m picking a phrase straight out of the British playbook and putting it into the Knee Deep yearbook. This new year, I’m going for the dogs bollocks. The dogs bollocks. That’s right, I’m going with a phrase from straight across the pond. Call me un-American, accuse me of watching too many Bean movies, but be ready for six seven to implode on the spiral of cheesy history and jolly good disappear. Last year may have gone to dogs, this year goes to the dogs bollocks.
I have to say though, I was very tempted to use a couple of other choice superlatives, a couple that nearly made the cut. My father liked to call out his best life by using the word genius. Everything and everyone who ever hit their groovy was, in his eyes was…GENIUS! Still, I could never quite get on board with that one. To me, that word, again set the bar too high. I mean once you’ve reached that level of knowledge, where do you go? Super genius? Mega? Ultra? After I spoke them out loud, genius, and its cousin ultra and mega began to sound like perfumed shampoos. I just couldn’t see belting that out when my favorite football team scored. Nope. Genius for me was out.
I also took a brief look at the word brilliant, but I questioned its practicality, its ability to slip into the conversation without taking over, like the word smooth did in 1893. Yet, I imagined people reacting to brilliant by covering their eyes every time I blurted it out, and I certainly didn’t want to watch that in the coming year. Brilliant was out, and I was stuck.
A deeper dive was needed.
I turned to a few of the great thinkers in history who have paved the pathway towards the new epic, guys like American poet, writer and tempo-setter, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who advised us, to “write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.” I love that sentiment. It calls for personal responsibility and fortitude, focuses on a sensitivity for those around us. Yet, it calls for a lot of intentionality, having goals and so forth. I could get behind the idea of doing something every day, but for others, daily obligations like making every single stinkin’ day the best day would soon melt down into some bland liquid, lazy form of groovy, (a word popularized in 1937).
I was on a better track with author and scholar Joseph Cambell, who talked about living your best life by “following your bliss,” yet he wasn’t blind to those days that weren’t so killer, days that exhausted our spanking good optimism. He said we could tap into our connections with people, to find what kind of stellar they brought to the table since the beginning of time. Cambell said at that table we all have a smashing seat, a seat linked to belonging, to family and to our stunning inner power.
Brandon Sanderson, an American science fiction author, also picked up on the table idea for growing and being supported in a family – our tribe. Our table, he said, is surrounded by different kinds of chairs, where we are invited to sit because someone said hello, got up and made room for us, asked us questions about ourselves and listened to us.
Immediately this sounded like a good way to go into 2026. It also started to sound like some great people I’ve known, wise folks who had been doing the chair thing all their lives, long before words like wicked, bad or wowsers came along. That tribe put aside their stellar wisdom, stood for something solid, but never got so slick that they could not make a seat for someone squeaky like me. Their brand of excellent held its standard in curiosity and wonder, something off the chart, something special (circa 1620).
In the next year, 2026, I began to think I’d like to hear that voice, maybe develop the talk myself. I’d hear: “Hey would you look at who’s here? Come in! Join us! Where you been? What is up with your bad self, anyway? What’s shaken, bacon? You lookin’ good bruder, like stylin, like… like, yea…have a seat!”
I’d like to find that table. I’d like to hear those words and say them myself. That would be the dogs bollocks.
Perhaps that scenario would look a lot like surrender, perhaps not a chart at all. Words like impressive or intense would not be there. Instead, there would just be open seats. The high bar would be lowered, spiffy walls would be less rigid, great crowns made of thorns would come off, and epic agendas would be put aside. The chairs might have names on them like wisdom and peace, the ones we’ve heard a thousand times, but at the head of the table there’d be an empty chair, one ready for the guy spinning off their own personal spiral, the guy who just needed a place to be.
Mark Twain said that wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d rather have talked. I would add that acceptance is the reward you get when you didn’t think you had a life. It is the table with the sweet seat, not the dogs bollocks, reserved for you – showing you what welcome looks like.
While 2026 may be will be every kind of fabulous and dandy, maybe even reach the level of bussin’, gassed or dope, it may also hold something even better when all the superlatives of excellence, those slicks and stunnings we are used to hearing, take a back seat to the chair held out for you with no expectations other than who you are.
The dog’s bollocks? Could be 2026, but something like acceptance, a good ol’ fashioned Yes! might be the new dazzle for me.