rizz

Rizz arrived as a compliment and quickly became a unit of measurement. There is unspoken rizz, which is rizz achieved through eye contact and silence. There is W rizz and L rizz, which are the same attempt sorted by outcome. There are videos of people approaching strangers in grocery aisles, cut to under a minute, with the rating supplied in the comments by an audience that was at home.

What the word measures is hindsight. A line that worked is rizz. The identical line, delivered by the same person at the next table, is a story someone tells their group chat. The term therefore has perfect accuracy for events that have already happened and none for events that have not, which makes it popular with commentators and of limited use to participants.

The older vocabulary of charm took a paragraph to describe anything. Rizz compresses the whole transaction into a single syllable that can be awarded or withheld, and the awarding is usually done by someone who watched from a distance while holding everyone’s jackets.

I am in no position to be superior about retrospective scoring, because this entire site is retrospective scoring with a decimal point on it. The disclosures in this file were only disclosures once I had written them down in a column; on the evening each one was made I recorded it as candour. The question counts on every scorecard are estimates reconstructed by topic, because I was never actually counting at the table. The figures are honest about being figures and the basis column says so for each one. That still leaves 44 documents awarding and withholding, from 10 feet away, holding the jackets.