Recent years have been boom times for language that is inarticulate on purpose. Vibe has become a diagnosis; chaos has become an all-purpose condition. Dictionaries have highlighted, as their words of the year, brain rot and post-truth and an emoji caught between laughter and tears. But [gestures around] might be the term of the decade. It is a vestige of 2016 that, precisely because it is self-consciously speechless, captures the tensions of life in 2026. You can tell a lot about an age by its propensity for empty [gestures]. You can tell a lot about ours by the fact that bracketed addlement is, at this point, a cliché.