Wordability towers has been very quiet the last few weeks, due largely to the fact that it has been relocated. Now safely ensconced in gleaming new surroundings in the dictionary city of Oxford, not far in fact fact from where it was previously located in the city of the leaning spires, it is time to resume the quest for the new words which are going to show staying power.

Actually, I am sticking to my mantra of last year a little on this, when I felt that the state of semantic creativity was not quite up there with some years of other vintages, and I think that 2015 is carrying on along similar lines. But in the last couple of months, a few words have caught my eye.

In particular, as a cricket fan, the term Pomicide, which was coined across social media and headlines to sum up just how England had crushed Australia in the Ashes, was a perfect word for capturing the level of the annhilation which the home side inflicted on its Antipodean visitors. It is a one-hit wonder word, and will likely disappear as quickly as it arrived, but it will be looked back on as the word of the 2015 cricket summer and may be resurrected should England subject Australia to a similar whipping in the future.

I was also briefly taken by brose, which is basically rose drunk by men, which is apparently happening with increasing frequency. The fact that this word has now been around for a couple of months but there are very few references suggests that it may not be quite the viticultural revolultion I had first supposed, and this is not a word that is going to hang around for very long.

But Yuccie is one which may be with us for the long term. Idenfitied and named on Mashable earlier this year, a Yuccie has elements of both a hipster and a Yuppie  and is a young urban creative soul, who has the creative ambitions of a hipster but the financial and lifestyle desires of a yuppie. As the Mashable piece puts it, a Yuccie is “a slice of Generation Y, borne of suburban comfort, indoctrinated with the transcendent power of education, and infected by the conviction that not only do we deserve to pursue our dreams; we should profit from them.”

Of course the very word itself is problematic. Someone could identify themselves as a hipster without fear of ridicule about using the term. The same is true of yuppie, even if that might be frowned upon for some other reason. But can you honestly see anybody saying ‘I’m a Yuccie’ and being proud of it? I think it’s unlikely. It’s the kind of thing someone in the playground may say to a fellow playmate in order to make them cry. So while it may well have some staying power for social commentators and headline writers, those for whom the term has been coined will surely be less prone to using it, which will inevitbly stymie is growth.

The Mashable article which coined the phrase makes a virtue of this, saying Yuccies are indeed Yucky because of the privileged position they often come from, which gives them the ability to make the kind of career choices which then define them. That’s all very well, but then who wants to identify themselves with a label which wears this connotation as a badge of honour. Not sure.

Nevertheless, the lifestyle described is very real, and if Yuccie is not to be the term which is eventually settled on, then I would suggest that something else will be. It’s worth keeping an eye on.

So I’ll sit in Wordability Towers’ new urban setting and watch the yuccies walk past in their creative way, drink a glass of brose to toast them and watch some more Pomicide on the television.