15 Vocabulary Terms I Fully Expect Taylor Swift to Use on Her Next Album
Taylor Swift has already done more for vocabulary instruction than some standardized curricula. Somewhere between clandestine meetings, calamitous love, incandescent imagery, and an entire song called “The Albatross,” she apparently decided that the SAT word list was also a songwriting resource.
So naturally, as an English teacher, I have begun preparing for what comes next.
These are the words and phrases I would not be remotely surprised to hear on Taylor Swift’s next album—and yes, I will be taking full credit if any of them show up.
1. Force Majeure
Meaning: An unexpected event beyond someone’s control that prevents them from fulfilling an obligation.
This is technically a legal term, which somehow makes it even more likely. Force majeure has everything: inevitability, helplessness, outside forces, fate, and the delicious possibility of using contract language as a metaphor for a doomed relationship.
Tell me you can’t already hear:
It was force majeure.
Track 7. Devastating.
2. Limerence
Meaning: An intense, often obsessive form of romantic infatuation characterized by longing, idealization, and a desperate need for reciprocation.
Frankly, I am shocked this one hasn’t appeared already.
Limerence is not just being in love. It’s the particular insanity of waiting for a text, rereading an interaction seventeen times, assigning meaning to punctuation, and constructing an entire relationship in your head.
In other words: songwriting material.
3. Palimpsest
Meaning: A manuscript that has been written on more than once, with traces of the original writing still visible underneath.
Metaphorically, a palimpsest can be anything that has been rewritten while still carrying evidence of what existed before.
Old relationship under the new relationship? Old version of yourself underneath the reinvention? Memories that refuse to disappear no matter how many times you rewrite the story?
Palimpsest is practically begging to become a Taylor Swift bridge.
4. Pyrrhic Victory
Meaning: A victory that comes at such a great cost that winning hardly feels like winning at all.
You got what you wanted.
You were right.
You won the fight.
And somehow, everything is worse.
This phrase has the exact kind of built-in contradiction that makes for a great breakup song. Victory and loss occupying the same sentence? Absolutely.
5. In Absentia
Meaning: In the absence of a person.
This one just sounds like an album title.
To love someone in absentia. To forgive someone in absentia. To have an entire argument with someone in absentia because they haven’t been in the room for six months but are somehow still taking up all the space.
I’m calling this one now.
6. Lacuna
Meaning: A gap, missing section, or something absent where something should exist.
It’s usually used to describe something missing from a text or record, but metaphorically?
The possibilities are endless.
The blank spot in your memory. The part of the story nobody will talk about. The person who left a gap behind. The missing explanation that makes everything else impossible to understand.
Also, “Lacuna” is objectively a fantastic song title.
7. Aporia
Meaning: A state of uncertainty, doubt, or an irresolvable contradiction.
Aporia is the moment when you genuinely do not know what to believe anymore.
Was it real? Was I imagining it? Were you lying? Was I lying to myself? Can two completely contradictory things somehow both be true?
It’s basically the vocabulary word for an emotionally disastrous bridge.
8. Anagnorisis
Meaning: The moment in a story when a character suddenly recognizes or discovers an important truth.
Every English teacher knows this moment.
The realization.
The penny drops.
The protagonist finally sees what the audience has been screaming at them for 200 pages.
And Taylor Swift loves a song that turns on a realization. The first two verses tell one story, and then the bridge arrives and suddenly we understand the whole thing differently.
That is anagnorisis.
Yes, it is also incredibly satisfying to say.
9. Folie à Deux
Meaning: Literally “madness of two”; a shared delusion or false belief between two people.
Two people believing something together that nobody else understands.
Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s denial. Maybe everybody around them can see exactly how this ends except the two people involved.
Tell me this phrase would not fit perfectly on an album full of doomed romance.
Bonus points because it is French and therefore automatically sounds 30% more dramatic.
10. Interregnum
Meaning: A period between two reigns, governments, or eras.
This one is especially interesting because it doesn’t have to be romantic.
An interregnum is the in-between.
The space after one identity ends but before the next begins. The weird quiet period between eras. The point when you know something is over but don’t yet know what comes next.
For an artist whose career is literally discussed in “eras,” this feels almost suspiciously appropriate.
11. Cathexis
Meaning: The investment of emotional or mental energy into a person, object, or idea.
This one comes from psychoanalytic theory, so obviously it has the proper level of unnecessary intellectual drama.
But I love the concept.
You can stop speaking to someone and still have an enormous amount of emotional energy tied up in them. You can know something is over and still be psychologically invested in it.
That attachment is cathexis.
And now I desperately need someone to rhyme it with something.
12. Penumbra
Meaning: The partially shaded area around the darkest part of a shadow.
First of all: gorgeous word.
Second, it practically comes with its own metaphor.
Not darkness. Not light. The blurry area between the two.
The shadow left behind by something that’s gone. Living just outside someone’s attention. Existing on the edge of a memory.
Very poetic. Very dramatic. Extremely usable.
13. Ersatz
Meaning: A substitute or imitation, usually one considered inferior to the real thing.
Fake love.
Replacement friends.
A new relationship that looks suspiciously like the old one.
A copy of something you can’t actually replace.
Ersatz is short, slightly strange, and mean in a very specific way.
I would like it immediately.
14. Apotheosis
Meaning: The elevation of someone to divine status, or the highest point in the development of something.
This one gives us fame.
Idealization.
Putting someone on a pedestal.
Becoming larger than life.
Discovering that someone you worshipped is actually just a person.
There are approximately fifteen different directions you could take this metaphor, and all of them sound expensive.
15. Denouement
Meaning: The final resolution of a story after its climax.
Yes, English teachers already know this one.
But I am waiting for it to escape the plot diagram and become emotionally devastating.
Because a denouement is not necessarily the exciting part. It’s what happens after everything happens. The pieces settle. People leave. The consequences remain.
Imagine it as the final track on an album.
“Denouement.”
I’m just saying.
My Most Confident Predictions
If I had to put money on only five, I’m choosing:
Limerence. Force majeure. In absentia. Palimpsest. Folie à deux.
And if one of those appears on the next album, I reserve the right to become completely insufferable about it.
In the meantime, English teachers: congratulations. We may have just found our next vocabulary lesson.