I am not a fan of most reality television, and have never watched reality shows from South Africa. However, a word coined in a recent South African show has quickly gone viral, justifiably so.

A recent episode of Our Perfect Wedding featured the build-up to the wedding of Mr and Mrs Madikane, but with time ticking, a guest walked into the room and in hurrying people up, declared that “lateism is never ever in my gender or calendar.”

Lateism became very popular across social media in South Africa, and not just because of the slightly bizarre sentence in which it featured. It actually left me wondering why we don’t already have this word, as many people have a tendency to be late the whole time, and this word seems to sum up that condition perfectly. I have been accused of it, only sometimes fairly, and I can certainly think of others I know well for whom lateism could be said to be a natural state of being.

So while lateism may be end up being a word which has a brief flourish in South Africa and then disappears again, I think it fufils a valuable gap in the vocabulary and we should try to use it where at all possible.

Maybe lateism never become ‘the late lateism’.