Category: Week in Words

An Awks Week for All

It’s been an awkward week for many people. It started with the Golden Globes, and the meeting of present and possibly future James Bond, Daniel Craig and Idris Elba. The photo of the two of them together, with the single word ‘Awks’, was one of the dominant images of the day:

What is particularly Awks about embedding the above tweet is that the word Awks disappears and you have to click on the tweet itself to see the Awkwardness in all its glory. But at least that represents the first time I have ever used the word Awks in any sort of company, and while it has been common across social media for some time, and has even made it to Oxford Dictionaries Online (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/awk), the Bondesque tweet certainly gave it a new lease of life this week.

Awkwardness was certainly the order of the day in the UK Parliament this week, as the Brexit debate rolled back into view. And it wasn’t so much the coining of new words which dominated linguistic debate, but more the reappearance of a very old word, as the controversial decision to allow an amendment to the Brexit procedure allowed Jacob Rees-Mogg to question the meaning of the word forthwith in John Bercow’s interpretation of parliamentary procedure. Cue parliament getting derailed into a discussion about nuances of meaning and Twitter comedians throwing the word forthwith into many of their utterances. Even TV commentators got into the act, debating the meaning of forthwith on the BBC rather than the substance of the issues facing the UK instead. It could hardly be said that a word of Middle English origin made it to social media popularity ‘forthwith’, but it has now finally arrived.

An attempt this week to coin a new word seems unlikely to catch on because it is just too awkward. In the United States. sports agent Scott Boras has discussed options for different types of contracts for top players and suggested the ‘Swellopt’. This is a type of contract that changes as it goes on and can be of benefit to the player or the club. Or as he explained it to Ken Rosenthal on Fox: “For the club, if the player performs well, the club can opt in (contract swells). For the player, if the club doesn’t opt in, the player has the choice to continue with the contract (swell) or opt out. It’s a swell option for both.” Clear as mud then.

Bit of awkwardness for me after my posting last week. My daughter has now pointed out to me that she uses the word Yeet to mean Yes, which means I did her a disservice when I suggested that she is joining the masses of people putting meaningless words in random order, but also suggests that the definitive meaning of Yeet is still to be fixed. She responded by telling me about the issuing of an Apology Project on instagram, a concept which seems to be a deeply thought out apology for a perceived social media slight. On initial search, this doesn’t seem to be a wide practice, but if anyone can correct me on this, then I owe her an apology project.

An awkward subject? The name for research into human waste. There is currently no specific term for it, so Professor Aadra Bhatt has suggested In Fimo, derived from the Latin Fimus meaning, fairly obviously, dung. The Verge has got so excited about this development it has devoted an entire article to it. I prefer to keep the pages of Wordability clean, so just offer the link instead.

To return to Brexit to finish, even with the UK set to leave the European Union, maybe there is still away for the UK’s influence to continue to take over. Henning Lobin, director of the Leibniz Institute for the German language, gave an interview to Deutsche Wells in which he admitted that Anglicisms are continuing to creep into the German language, with words such as Clickbait and Bingewatching being recognised as part of the language. He said that while the overall integrity of German is not currently under threat, “it’s definitely susceptible…many terms come from things that were first invented, discovered and named in an English-speaking environment.”

So the UK may be leaving Europe, but its language is being left behind as an increasingly dominating force. And that could be awkward for everyone.

A New Year’s Resolution

A Gap Year is the standard term for a year off. I’d like to claim that the near 12-month hiatus in writing any new entries for Wordability is the result of a life-changing time away in which I have visited countless new places, met hordes of fascinating new people and learned to grow my own vegetables.

Sadly, none of the above is true. The simple fact is, writing Wordability had stopped being fun. When I started the blog, back in 2011, I knew there would always be enough material to keep it fresh. Its remit was to pick up new words as they emerged and write about where they came from, how they were being utilised, and whether they appeared to have the stamina to remain part of the ever-changing English Language. And more than 200 posts later, this blog has fulfilled that remit.

Last year I found that the constant trawl for new words was becoming a chore, or when I did see something I was convinced was novel, it actually turned out to have been around for two or three years, thereby breaking the slightly draconian rules I had created for myself when the blog started. And so I got out of the habit.

But the bug to be part of the conversation about language remained, and it was helped by the realisation that since this is my blog, then I can amend the rules I use to decide whether a word can be featured. So what if a word has been used for a year or more when I first come across it? It’s still pretty new, and still represents change and creativity in English, and is therefore worthy of consideration.

So, I thought to myself, rather than constantly hunting for newsworthy items, and only writing about them if they fit strict criteria, what about simply celebrating things which are new to me or other people, even if they are not freshly minted. And while I’m at it, how about removing the pressure I sometimes placed on myself to get something out as soon as I came across it, and instead simply write one post a week that covers whatever I have seen over the last seven days. Now that sounds a lot more entertaining.

So what I have seen this week? Well, I have decided not to hark back to the words of last year, though I did enjoy the American Dialect Society’s various words of the year, mostly because their slang word of the year was Yeet, a word my daughter often uses when sending me messages, for no apparent reason. Entertainingly, she had been using it with no idea for what it meant, and seemed uninterested when I told her it is an ‘indication of surprise or excitement’. This raised a wider concern to me that people may simply be putting random words onto instant messages without worrying overly about what any of it means, which is slightly perturbing for the future of communication in general.

I have also decided to leave Donald Trump and Brexit well alone this week. I am confident that over the course of the next 12 months, they will contribute reams of material to me, as they continue to dominate political landscapes on either side of the Atlantic.

However, veganism has featured prominently in my mind, largely because I thought I had seen a new generic word for Vegan Cheese. Sky News used the term Sheese to describe this product this week, but on further investigation, it looks like Sheese is simply one vegan cheese product, and not a catch-all for the category.

Having said that, a generic term for vegan cheese would prove quite useful, on the basis there isn’t one at the moment. Vegan cheese eaters spotted this a couple of years ago, and an online movement to rename it Gary was born. Hard to imagine really how this didn’t catch on. But while we wait to see whether further first names are hijacked to become monikers for vegan fare (“Do you want some melted Gary on that fried Bert?”), it is worth nothing that the term ‘plant-based’ instead of vegan is beginning to be used with increasing frequency, primary as a way of countering the ire with which veganism is greeted by some. Veganuary is in full swing now, and while it is yet another of those remodelled months which has so irked me in the past, it does demonstrate that words about what we eat are set to dominate and evolve as the next 12 months passes.

As people are happy to say, we live in interesting times. The English language is bound to reflect that as the year progresses, and it will be fun to see what changes.