A 2013 dictionary (abridged)

In the real world, he was a damaged politician seeking forgiveness. In the virtual world, he was someone else — Carlos Danger — trying to woo women with shots of his naked self. Anthony Weiner’s was at once the strangest political sex scandal and the most ordinary. It belonged in a year when privacy and exposure were at war, and digital communications were the weapons of choice. But that doesn’t explain why he chose to seek redemption while repeating his offense. Weiner should have heeded the advice embedded in his screen name. That he did not illustrates just how disorienting a matrix the new media of 2013 proved to be.

It went everywhere with him and was often more eloquent than the neophyte candidate who wore it. “I am strong. I am brave. I am disciplined,” was the message sent by the olive green jacket favored by ex-Navy SEAL Gabriel E. Gomez, the GOP nominee for Senate in this year’s special election. His flight jacket was as ubiquitous as the barn coat worn by fellow Republican Scott Brown a few years before. But it wasn’t as effective with voters. While Brown lived up to the regular-guy image suggested by his garb, the flight jacket set a higher standard — one that Gomez, who campaigned on generalities and stumbled in debates, couldn’t quite meet. The Gomez mission failed once voters saw the gap between image and reality.

The papacy is the oldest continuously functioning institution in history, but it can still surprise. When Benedict XVI resigned on Feb. 28, he became the first living ex-pope in nearly six centuries. Never before had a pontiff relinquished the Fisherman’s Ring for reasons of health. Benedict’s decision to do so contrasted vividly with his predecessor’s long and painful decline.

The MOST famous image from this year’s Red Sox World Series run came on the thrilling, score-tying grand slam home run by David Ortiz in Game 2 of the American League championship battle with the Detroit Tigers. As Tigers outfielder Torii Hunter flew over the wall in vain to catch the ball, Globe photographer Stan Grossfeld captured Steve Horgan of the Boston Police Department exulting along with the Fenway faithful, his outstretched arms in perfect synch with Hunter’s upside-down legs.

In dense urban centers, 300-square-foot apartments are nothing new; residents of New York, Paris, and Tokyo are well-versed in the tradeoff between space and location. But rebranded as “micro-units,” tiny apartments have gained traction in resurgent cities like Boston, too, as part of the trendy urban planner’s standard toolkit for divvying up space. (See also: bike sharing, food trucks, pop-up stores.) This year, the Boston Redevelopment Authority sought to ease minimum apartment sizes somewhat, making way for more micro-units. In his mayoral campaign, Marty Walsh supported building perhaps 1,000 of them across the city.

President Obama this year found a red line can prove more difficult to enforce than to draw. In August 2012, he pledged severe consequences should Bashar Assad of Syria use chemical weapons against rebel fighters or civilians. Intelligence reports this summer confirmed that red line had been crossed, putting the United States on the brink of yet another military intervention in the Middle East. Fortunately, another loose ultimatum — this time by Secretary of State John Kerry — ended the standoff with Syria agreeing to hand over its chemical weapons.

A CRUCIAL episode of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” in June left audiences reeling and crying. Something happened that — well, in the spirit of spoiler avoidance, let’s just say something happened at a wedding. What’s notable is that millions of people had already read the fantasy books on which the series is based, so they knew a shocking episode was coming. Somehow, nearly all of them managed to stay mum until it aired. The Red Wedding turned out to be an encouraging test case for TV-viewing etiquette in the social media era — as well as a new shorthand for a game-changing moment in any TV show. The term was later used to describe an episode of “The Good Wife” where . . . well, something happened.

Maybe you actually watched “Beverly Hills 90210” star Ian Ziering saw a shark in half with a chainsaw during a tornado. Maybe you only heard about it because the campy B-movie on the SyFy network became a massive, unexpected Twitter phenomenon. In an era of overdone special effects and high-minded prestige dramas, “Sharknado” was a midsummer jolt of campy relief: proof that people across the country can bond over preposterous TV.

A term that’s basically Cold War-ese for “staying indoors” took on new importance in Massachusetts this year. On the Friday morning after the Marathon bombing, police agencies combed the streets of Watertown in a furious search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Fearing that the bombing suspect would slip away, or perhaps harm morning commuters on a crowded MBTA, Governor Patrick asked a million residents of Boston, Watertown, and other communities to shelter in place. They did.

As the troubles with HealthCare.gov became embarrassingly apparent, President Obama likened his administration’s repair efforts to the troop escalation that once helped stabilize the situation in Iraq. “We’ve had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team. And we’re well into a tech surge to fix the problem,” Obama said. Those e-enforcements came amid accusations that entailed more IT jargon: that, in its frantic attempts to mend the website, the administration was “hot-swapping code” — which is to say, attempting to repair the troubled software while it was in operation. This approach, some administration critics charged, could put enrollees’ sensitive information at risk.