Category: Wordability In Brief

Short entries on new words and usages which Wordability has spotted and
enjoyed

Will Woyomism Spread Across The World?

If you are a regular reader of Wordability, the chances are that you have never heard of Alfred Agbesi Woyome. But if you are reading this in Ghana, you will know all about him.

Woyome is currently on trial in Ghana, accused of defrauding the country’s Government out of more than 50 million Ghanian Cedi (GHC). It’s a high profile case and is duly getting lots of coverage.

So why should Wordability be interested? Well, the case has prompted an outburst of new words, especially across social media. Using Woyome as a basis to mean a systematic attempt to defraud a country, a whole raft of words are now cropping up across the internet. These include:

Woyomics: The art of using fake documents to acquire a gargantuan money

Woyometicable: A system that can easily be Woyomised

Woyometrics: The science of calculating a huge sum of money obtained woyomecally.

Woyomee: Someone who has been Woyomised or a person who has suffered as a result of Woyome issue

Woyomer: A person using Woyomic strategy to acquire a gargantuan money from the state or Someone who Woyomises people.

Will these catch on outside Ghana? Possibly not, but with the interconnected world we now live in, it is a reminder that changes to the English language can come from any country, at any time.

And if you do start to hear the term in regular conversation, remember where you read about it first.

Swapportunity Knocks for New Word

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset – Swapportunity is not a recognised word. But is its status about to change?

Swapportunity’s current emergence is an advertising executive’s dream. The word features in an American commercial for yoghurt company Yoplait. The ad revolves around an earnest boy taking part in a spelling bee and shows his horror when he is asked to spell the word ‘Swapportunity’. His ire is not helped when he is told that it is defined as “The opportunity to swap a higher calorie snack for a delicious Yoplait Light”. Affronted, he protests that it is not a real word. It’s very funny, and worth a look:

Clearly, swapportunity will not catch on as a genuine word if its definition is tied up with low calorie yoghurts. But it does have a chance as a more generic word, meaning the opportunity to swap something.

Now I know that this isn’t a yawning chasm of meaning crying out for a word to encapsulate it. But there is evidence that it is being used. An Atlanta fashion event, The Ultimate Swapportunity, has just taken place. Musician website The Gear Page has discussed using it to create a market for musicians to trade instruments. And there are isolated examples from the last couple of years to show that this linguistic innovation has been on the margins, with a Forbes piece about corporate bonds being the most high brow.

So while swapportunity will not be appearing in dictionaries in the next few weeks, I think it has a chance of not only growing online but also being used at trading events. I am sure it is an opportunity it would not want to swap.

Banish Blue Monday – Vote for Wordability

What is it with colours and days? Towards the end of last year, we had Black Friday, a shopping day tradition from America which is now spreading around the world. And thanks to the influence of a mobile phone company, we all know that the busiest days at the cinema are Orange Wednesdays.

And so to the most depressing day of the year, which is rapidly coming to an end as I write this. According to scientists, the third Monday is awarded this dubious accolade because of the combination of post-Christmas depression, bills and gloomy weather. Welcome to “Blue Monday”.

The date of Blue Monday is calculated according to a special and complex formula devised by psychologist Cliff Arnall. Its slightly nonsensical nature probably explains why it is not a naming convention that has really caught on – after all, you probably only really know that Blue Monday is almost over because I just told you. And apparently Dr Arnall now believes that Blue Monday should be called Red Monday to mark the influence of our increasing economic woes. If the expert behinds the day isn’t even convinced of the name any more, what hope for the rest of us.

It just goes to show that naming something to try and define it is not always a guarantee of getting it to seep into public consciousness.

Of course, if you have been suffering from Blue Monday-itis, good news is at hand. Wordability has been nominated in the Best Blog category in the Macmillan Love English awards 2011. So why don’t you follow this link and vote for Wordability – it will help to lift those January blues!

Who’s Been Looking in my Wardrobe?

You have to love the Urban Dictionary. It’s a website made up of definitions submitted by users to reflect the way they speak, with scant regard for whether the words and phrases suggested will ever pass the test of the lexicographer.

Their daily ‘word of the day’ e-mail is a mixture of the bizarre, the hilarious and the sometimes obscene. But what I didn’t expect was that one day, it would feature a definition related to my wardrobe.

So I give you the word of the day for January 10 – Hugh Wear. Hugh Wear is defined as ‘The name for a person’s extensive wardrobe of bath robes’. Frankly, I’m flummoxed. I only have one. And it hangs on a door. Surely somebody has defined this word incorrectly, surely it should have been ‘A language expert’s collection of slightly frayed shirts’.

I did wonder whether Hugh Wear was an Urban Dictionary original or a term which had gained internet notoriety. But it seems not. It is a new line of clothing, celebrating the country and the old West. Nothing to do with me, I don’t even own a stetson. There is also a gun shop in Kentucky, and a an Illinois resident who was born in 1841. He had five children, so maybe he had lots of bath robes knocking around the place.

Sadly, I am not sure I will be able to find a suitable explanation for this trend. Just have to go out and buy a dressing gown, I guess.

Why Gloomadon-Poppers will never catch on

You have to admire that Boris Johnson. He seems to be waging a one-man campaign to get a new word to take off. But after six years of trying, I think he should now concede defeat.

The Mayor of London has been at it again, describing people who believe that the city will grind to a halt during next year’s Olympics as Gloomadon-Poppers. His office has even had to explain this term, saying it is defined as people who habitually put out negative news.

The thing is, it isn’t the first time that Mr Johnson has used this term. Way back in 2005, he said that Gordon Brown was a gloomadon-popping old busybody in a piece in The Telegraph. He described Ken Loach as gloomadon-popping in a Telegraph article about the film industry in 2006. In 2008, he wrote about Gordon Brown and the gloomadon-poppers of the BBC.  And in 2009, he penned a slightly weird article about bees and the gloomadon-poppers of the Financial Times.

Yet despite all his efforts, the word will just not catch on. I have managed to find one independent usage of it, in a Daily Mail piece by Harry Phibbs from January 2011. And yet despite this linguistic cold shoulder, he is at it again and what one can only hope is a final, desperate attempt to launch his word.

I think it is obvious why this has not worked as a new word. It makes no sense when you hear it. It has to be explained to you. For a neologism to take off, you have to get it the first time you hear it. And so I am afraid, Mr Johnson, your gloomadon has been well and truly popped.

The Forth Bridge ends a Linguistic Era

While Wordability loves to celebrate the arrival of new words and phrases, it also needs to stop and mark the moment when a phrase ceases to be. Normally it would be hard to pin that down, but we can date one such occasion to December 9, 2011.

That was when the painting of the Forth Road Bridge in Edinburgh came to an end.

And so we can no longer say ‘it’s like painting the Forth Bridge’ to describe something which feels endless and which starts again as soon as it finishes. Instantly, the phrase now means ‘It will take a long time but you’ll get there in the end. Go home, you never have to do this again’. Not really much cop any more, is it.

Twitter quickly jumped into action to suggest alternatives, marking them with the hash tag #islikepaintingtheforthbridge. Politics was the most obvious subject for never-ending tasks, with suggestions such as ‘Finding a banker willing to accept responsibility for their failed gambles’ from Neocon Hitman, or Christine Roberts’ suggestion of ‘Watching David Cameron and William Hague on television’. Dan Frost went pleasingly self-referential with ‘Coming up with metaphors to replace painting the forth bridge’. But my personal favourite was Chewbacca, who went on to Twitter to suggest ‘Shaving a Wookie’. Accurate, but hard to see it catching on really.

So what should we use? It would be dull to choose something prosaic and domestic, such doing the washing or clearing up after children. After all,those are the kind of chores that the Forth Bridge phrase existed to describe. And I think that the political suggestions floating around will not be long-lasting enough to resonate in the English Language.

So what is going to exist for some time, is well known to many people and feels like it starts again as soon as it has finished. The football season? Apple product launches? Watching reality television? All accurate, but none feels solid enough.

I think we may have to wait for a new long-running project to emerge to take over the mantle. Or failing that, we can just sit it out for a few years. The paint on the Forth Bridge is bound to start peeling eventually.

Brad Pitt Quits Acting to Produce a New Word

The world of acting may still be coming to terms with Brad Pitt’s announcement that he will quit acting in three years’ time, but the world of lexicography may soon be welcoming a new innovater.

In making his announcement that he is going to hang up his script at the age of 50, the actor announced that instead, he is going to go behind the camera, as he has enjoyed “the producerial side”.

There seems no obvious reason why “producerial” doesn’t work as a word, even though it clearly doesn’t. Sometimes a word just sounds wrong, and that is enough reason to feel uncomfortable around it. Words ending in ‘r’ which have an ‘-ial’ tacked on the end can work. Managerial is a perfectly fine word. Or if Brad Pitt had wanted to go behind the camera in a different way, he could have had a successful directorial career.

But this is not a universal linguistic rule, it seems, and unlike some situations, where you can add a prefix or a suffix to make up a word that at least sounds OK, with this suffix, you can’t. Teacherial, actorial, hookerial – none of these add a sensible adjectival element to these professions.

It could be as simple as the fact that they are not filling a linguistic need – we don’t really need an adjective from these words, they are not filling a linguistic hole, so they simply sound wrong.

And to prove that such words are not necessary, you only have to check out the Spanish versions of the Brad Pitt story. “He disfrutado mucho el lado producerial,”, the translation declares. Producerial is not translated into a neat Spanish alternative, it seems to be producerial in any language. And so the first thing that Brad Pritt has produced since his announcement is a word that nobody needs.

Shovels at the ready

In an effort to get Britain moving again, the Coalition Government has announced a new series of building projects. And to show just how imminent they really are, the press has been describing six as ‘shovel-ready’.

From what I can see, this is the first time that this particular phrase has crossed the Atlantic. Shovel-ready, basically meaning that building can start immediately, seems to have emerged at the end of 2008 in a Barack Obama interview. So it’s a phrase you can believe in.

Now I am no building expert, but given the enormity of modern building projects, a shovel seems quite the least of it. Breeze block-ready, concrete mixer-reader, giant crane-ready – these would have carried the same meaning and also been more evocative of what was actually going to happen.

To give the Government its due, it doesn’t seem that Nick Clegg, who was promoting the policy, has actually used the phrase ‘shovel-ready’ in speeches or interviews. It’s probably a good job. If he had, some of his opponents might have wanted to know what he was shovelling.

The World’s Most Expensive Haircut

Many industries appropriate words for their own devices, but their peculiar internal language doesn’t permeate through to the masses. But there are occasions when a piece of linguistic jargon breaks free, and the current financial crisis in the Eurozone is one such example.

All over the UK, newspapers have been debating – what do you think about the haircut?

Now you could be forgiven for thinking that this is no time to be focusing on coiffures and tints, and you would be right. But of course this isn’t really about a visit to the local salon. This is about well-established financial jargon hitting the mainstream.

Understanding it is somewhat harder. The online Financial Dictionary defines a haircut as the value to securities used as collateral in a margin loan. And lots of other stuff as well. I’ll be testing you on that shortly.

I have had it explained to me a lot more simply. Basically, if I lend you £100 and then take a 50% haircut, as the European banks have, I can only expect to get £50 back. Take that, securities and collateral.

But what has actually been irritating about the coverage is the way that haircut has been liberally sprinkled throughout media reports in a kind of knowing way, without it really being defined properly. It confers a kind of legitimacy on the writers and creates the sense that they are in the know and are experts. They must be, just look at the way they effortlessly use the jargon. Many journalists would have been a lot better just avoiding the term and finding a cleaner way to express their thoughts. Hiding behind the jargon is sometimes plain lazy.

But maybe Wordability should campaign for more haircut-related financial terminology to enter common speech. Should commentators have been discussing whether the European banks should have accepted a trim, a short-back and sides or maybe a perm? Who needs to talk in percentages when you can talk in split ends instead?

Or maybe another term connected with cutting things off would have been more appropriate. But I’m not sure that headlines about the kind of circumcision the banks were going to get would really have worked.

All Together Now: It’s Singalongability

An academic has published a study about what makes us join in with certain pieces of music – what gives them, to use her brand-new term, singalongability.

Now Wordability loves the fact that English allows us to put -ability at the end of another word and create something intelligible. Frankly without this, Wordability wouldn’t be, well, it wouldn’t be Wordability. It is the English language’s great wordability which allows it.

So Wordability salutes Dr Alisun Pawley of York University, who worked with Dr Daniel Musselsiefen of Goldsmith’s University, to decide what makes a song singalongable.

They identified four key factors: longer phrases, a greater number of pitches in the chorus hook, male vocalists and higher male voices with a noticeable vocal effort. Their research put Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’ top of the singalongability list.

But what makes singalongability such a great word is that it has an almost onomatopoeic quality. Its multi-syllable nature, and jaunty rhythm when you say it, make it the kind of word you could actually join in with.

Don’t believe me? Well then, I give you the type of music which is surely the most singalongable in the world – nursery rhymes. So easy to sing along with, even a two-year-old can do it.

Now, try replacing the words of Pop Goes the Weasel, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Humpty Dumpty with just one word – singalongability.

Go on, try it. You’ll soon get what I mean.