What The Reset Means
The year the whole house gets cleaned at once.
The move: The Great Meme Reset is the "drop the dead words" moment - the declaration that a whole batch of terms has been used so many times in a row that the word itself has become the joke. It is not a single word dying. It is the house being cleaned, because the terms have piled up into a layer that covers everything and says nothing about any of it.
Why it is a reset, not a ban: nobody is telling you the word is wrong. The word is fine. The word is just past its use - the point where it stopped being about the thing and became the default you reach for instead of the thing. That is the moment a word goes on the reset list: not because it stopped working, but because it stopped being worth working for.
Where it spread: it started as the inside joke - the "no more of that" moment the room all agreed on at once - and became a whole register for the new year. The joke is that it is a reset, the serious word, applied to the lightest stuff. The game reads whether you can tell the word that is still doing its job from the one that is just decoration.