Public service announcement: fellow citizens, we have maxxmaxxinged. It has been close for a while, but now we have gone over the edge – reached, and passed, maximum maxxing. The tipping point was a week in which we saw reports of Namemaxxing. If you can’t decide between two baby names, pick them both. Suggestions included blending Maeve and Avery to create Mavery, or Leo and Giovanni to make Leovanni – Futupid. Then Dictionary.com revealed its word of the year and, yes, you guessed it: maxxing. It’s fully exhausting, in every way, but mainly in that -maxx has been fully exhausted. For the good of us all, 2027 has to be the year of minning. (The second “n” is important, otherwise pits may be deluged.)
Maxxing is selfish, desperately try-hard and often futile – surely nobody who ever set out to funmaxx achieved it (see: New Year’s Eve), not even Dua Lipa. Minning is much more noble: it’s about making the world, rather than only yourself, better. Instead of pushing your endeavours to the limit, it means doing them less, if at all.
Andy Burnham could have leapt ahead of this trend when he unveiled his crackdown on headphone dodgers by declaring that he was loudcastminning. Other plagues against society with the potential to be similarly addressed are slow walking (dawdleminning), noisy eating (chewminning), not indicating when driving (mindreadminning), and absent-mindedly checking your phone mid-conversation (scrollminning). And let’s not forget dropping litter (binminning), turning up to a friend’s without warning (pop-inminning) and being over competitive (winminning.) Overall, this movement is about being as good a human being as possible (sinminning) but it’s also an opportunity to cut out habits such as drinking too many spirits (ginminning) and even negative familial relationships (kinminning).
Back in the days when all of this was fields and we only used one x in “max”, it was clear that max volume is too loud, max capacity too crowded, and max power too draining. Somewhere along the way we lost sight of that. Let’s take a deep breath, and enjoy the relief of leaning into minning. First person to suggest they’re doing maxxminning will be taken to the tower and made an example of.
Polly Hudson is a freelance writer
