Originally appeared on E! Online.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding won’t count her legion of fans among its attendees.
However, the public’s desire to attend has inspired Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year. The world’s most popular English dictionary awarded “parasocial” with its word of the year recognition, noting that part of its popularity stemmed from the famous couple’s engagement.
“Global coverage of the way in which Taylor Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce caused lookups of parasocial to surge as the media dissected fans’ reactions,” the dictionary wrote in its word of the year release. “Posts by fans say, ‘I’m not being parasocial about it,’ and talk about ‘a Swiftie being parasocial for 10 minutes straight.’”
Swift and Kelce’s joint Aug. 26 post announcing their engagement earned almost 40 million likes, and snagged a record for the fastest post to hit 1 million likes — earning the grand sum in less than six hours.
As for how Swift and Kelce feel about all the noise surrounding their romance? They’re just keeping it 100 on the land, the sea, the sky — no matter who is paying attention.
READ: Travis Kelce Shares Insight Into NYC Trip With Taylor Swift During His Bye Week
“Whenever I’m with her, it feels like we’re just regular people,” Kelce told GQ in a profile published in August. “When there is not a camera on us, we’re just two people that are in love.”
And while the Kansas City Chiefs player admitted the couple’s romance “can be perceived as something else because of how much it is talked about,” he assures it’s really no different than any other happy relationship.
“It happened very organically even though from a media standpoint it was being tracked,” he added. “It still happened very organically.”
Meanwhile, Swift has expressed her own appreciation for how her guy on the Chiefs can weather the fishbowl she’s permanently swimming in.
“If he’s seeing things and he thinks it’s funny and it doesn’t affect his day at all,” Swift explained during her Aug. 13 appearance on “New Heights.” “That’s going to completely bleed into the way I metabolize these things.”
As she put it, “It’s at a point where my name can be in the actual headline and it can still be none of my business.”
A professor at TCU used data analysis to study lyrical connections across Taylor Swift’s discography and found that her most popular songs often share key phrases. His research reveals how the stories in Swift’s music form a network of fan-favorite and chart-topping hits. NBC 5’s Tahera Rahman has the story.
