I read an interesting piece a few weeks ago about the Gangnam Style phenomenon. It said that linguists were doubtless having a fine time working out how it had become an idiomatic expression.
The question for me is – has it become an idiomatic expression? For those of you unfamiliar with the worldwide hit (and to my shame I must admit I was ignorant of it until recently, when a South Korean friend showed the video to my wife), Gangnam Style is a Korean music and dance phenomenon which has swept the world. Dictionary definitions, such as they are, refer to it as a Korean neologism for the lifestyle of those in the upscale Gangnam district of Seoul, while the wider definition is emerging as replicating the leg wagging, horse-like dance moves of the international smash hit.
But has it become wider than that yet, in a linguistic sense? When people refer to doing things Gangnam Style, are they talking about taking on an attitude and a way of doing things, or are they just referring to people copying the dance. I think it is the latter. At the moment, the internet is awash with soldiers, prisoners and Eton pupils performing their own takes on the song. But that’s currently all it is, albeit on a vast scale.
So while Gangnam Style will undoubtedly be cited as one of the words of the year when it comes to wrapping up the language of 2012, its meaning is likely to remain fixed to musical interpretations, rather than something which has become more entrenched in society.
The number of new words contributed to the English language by technology is well known. But how does a company which provides technology to help with language and communication cope with the ever-expanding tide of vocabulary?
Swiftkey in action
Swiftkey has garnered praise and awards for its predictive text app. Its nifty software allows users of Android devices to speed up their typing by anticipating what they are going to type and then suggesting it for them.
I wondered how the Swiftkey database keeps up to date, to ensure that it can offer users the newest words on the block. So I asked Dr Caroline Gasperin, who leads a team of eight language processing engineers responsible for most language-related tasks at the London-based company.
She explained that Swiftkey learns an individual’s linguistic habits, and that by extension this grows its global database as a result.
“Your SwiftKey will learn any word you teach it, you only have to type it once and it will be included in your personal language model on your device,” she said.
“Through the Personalisation feature – which allows you to sync it with your Gmail, Facebook and Twitter accounts – and through continuous use, SwiftKey learns the words you use and the contexts in which you use them so that its predictions and corrections are based on your own way of writing.”
This learning can then feed into the overall word database to help the word corpus grow. Caroline said: “We’ve started putting in place the infrastructure for learning new words from our user base.
“As users use the Personalisation feature of SwiftKey, we are able to collect statistics about the words they use and identify words that we did not know before. We are putting in place a semi-automatic process to identify which of those words could become part of a standard dictionary and consequently become part of our downloadable language modules.
“This process consists of observing the frequency of use of words over time: words which used to have few occurrences across our user base, but which start becoming more frequent over time, and which are mentioned by several of our users instead of by just one or a few, are considered as good candidates for being added to our dictionaries.
“It’s worth adding we take our users’ privacy extremely seriously and have policies in place to safeguard this. We do not process a user’s data personally.”
Dr Caroline Gasperin
So has the way that new words are assimilated changed, and is the process quicker than before? Caroline said: “We look into how many different people have used an unknown word in order to consider it as a potential new word in the language instead of a personal word.
“We take our users’ privacy seriously, so we’ve developed ways to discover words in wide use instead of focusing on single users.
“We haven’t followed users’ language use for long enough to know whether new words are being adopted faster than before, but we are working on getting those statistics.”
I have long since believed that new words are being created and accepted into the language considerably quicker than before, with technology the principal driver behind that evolution. It would be interesting to revisit Swiftkey at some point soon to see whether those promised statistics back up that theory. And the company also gives us a very clear steer about how its core business has to adapt to the ever-changing delights of the English language.
Sometimes people can just get a new word wrong. It must have seemed such a good linguistic idea when Hurricane Sandy started its progression northwards up the eastern United States and prepared to amalgamate with other systems, so creating a super storm. What a great joke to dub it Frankenstorm, a monster storm for the Halloween season.
The problem is of course that it sounds funny, it automatically raises a smile as a word. But given the devastation that Frankenstorm is now predicted to wreak, it is a hollow and wholly inappropriate joke, where the name selected completely undermines the seriousness of what is expected to happen.
At the time of writing this, I don’t know whether the dire predictions for New York came true. It may be that it turned out to be a Frankenstorm in a teacup, and the name will have gone back to being a bogeyman-type appendage that gets wheeled out in the future as a way of scaring people when the wind begins to howl.
But if havoc ensued, then Frankenstorm will forever be remembered in a ghoulish way and any humour associated with the initial coining will have vanished.
Regular readers of Wordability will know just how much I love Mitt Romney. And no, that is not a political statement at all, merely an acknowledgement of how many times linguistic issues seem to have followed him around during this lengthy election campaign.
But does the campaign finally have the new word that will prove decisive? I wrote at the start of the year about how individual words have the power to win elections, with Change helping to lead Barack Obama to glory four years ago.
So far in 2012, no word has quite emerged as decisive. Mr Romney has tried, but Obamaloney was poor. Instead, he has constantly found himself at the mercy of linguistic disasters not of his own making, while phrases like 47% and Binders Full of Women have dogged him.
And now, it looks like the President has cracked it. In a speech in Virginia, Mr Obama characterised his opponent’s ability to change his mind and position on key issues as ‘Romnesia’.
And it worked. The crowd loved it. More importantly, the Twitter crowd loved it. It trended madly on the network immediately, and has quickly established itself as a hashtag to be appended to anything even vaguely anti-Republican.
It’s a great neologism. It makes you think of Romney. It makes you think of forgetting. And it encapsulates the character flaw that Mr Obama wants to draw attention to. It could do for this election what flip-flop did for George Bush against John Kerry by becoming the word which crystallises the campaign and leads to eventual victory.
Have I overstated this? It’s hard to say. In the minds of the undecided voters, one new word can stick. And finding that key new word which is never forgotten could ultimately make the difference.
You know the story by now. Unheralded American sportsman is given his chance in the big time. He dominates every game he plays, becoming a national icon. His deeds spawn a new word in newpaper headlines. The word mushrooms, with official linguistic recognition not far behind. And then, the ultimate accoloade. He appears in Wordability.
OK, that’s not exactly how the story pans out. But it does seem to be a bit of a trend. Following Jeremy Lin’s basketball success earlier this year, and the associated mushrooming of Linsanity across the globe, comes another unlikely sporting and language star – Pete Kozma.
After six years on the fringes of the big time, Kozma was finally called into the St Louis Cardinals team at the end of August. Almost predictably, he has turned out to be sensational, taking a leading role in the National League series against the Washington Nationals, leading his team to victory and spawning the word Kozmania.
Will Kozmania be another Linsanity? Probably not. Jeremy Lin’s story was as much about him being the first American player of Taiwanese descent to make it in the big time as it was about an unlikely player dominating a sporting arena. And there’s something about the word – Kozmania sounds like something which grabs you for a short time and then you get over it, while Linsanity is more of a state of mind and likely to last longer.
But I could be wrong, and if I am, then who knows how many times that American sporting dream from my opening paragraph will be played out in the years to come. Especially the bit where they end up on Wordability.
There is no ignoring Boris Johnson. The Mayor of London, feted by many as a future Prime Minister, has stolen the headlines with a pair of appearances at the Tory party conference in Birmingham.
At the start of his first appearance on Monday night, he was prefaced by a video celebrating his re-election as London head honcho earlier this year. The video was preface by the caption ‘Mission Imborisable’.
A headline writer’s dream? Absolutely. An attempt to get a new word into the dictionary? Absolutely not. And yet…
As Boris coverage increases, and if stories about him and Downing Street continue to be written, the temptation to carry on using Imborisable in connection with any tale of Johnson-esque derring-do may prove irresistible to sub-editors up and down the land.
So while I do not see a future in which the OED features a word loosely defined as ‘an unlikely achievement by Boris Johnson’, I do think this is a word that will be around as a piece of political shorthand for the foreseeable future. And that is already an Imborisable achievement.
With lifespans getting longer and the structure of our lives in constant evolution, it is no surprise that changing circumstances are demanding new words.
Tweenagers is a wholly successful and well established example of this, a 21st century word to describe that awkward period between 10 and 14 when children are becoming more sophisticated but are not fully-fledged, hormonally-challenged actual teenagers.
And so at the other end of the scale comes Pretirement, a word which is slowly beginning to appear around the internet. Meanings are still being formed, but it seems to be shaking down into something which describes a new phase, namely the last period of someone’s working life in their early to mid-sixties, as they start to also focus on the things they want to do when they are fully retired.
That would be a good final meaning for pretirement, though there are currently conflicting definitions. For example, Shannon Ward and Diana Stirling believe it is a work-life balance choice that people can make much earlier in life, and have a flourishing website to prove it. Meanwhile, the Urban Dictionary reckons it is the period between higher education and work, the last chance you will have to relax for years. Interestingly, this is the meaning that has been submitted to the Collins new word suggestion project, though comments alongside the entry suggest it has been around in some form since 2005.
Nonetheless, it is clear that pretirement is a word that has not been given any kind of official recognition yet. It is being used to describe a variety of different phases, all of which are becoming a key part of modern life. I suspect it will finally become locked down as the final pre-retirement period, and it will be no surprise if it becomes as much a part of the English language as Tweenager in the next few years.
I do hope that current events in the Vatican are not a sign of linguistic developments to come. I mean, Wikileaks was one thing – it took the idea of a Wiki, and the idea of Leaks, stuck them together, and came up with a title and a concept which, basically, worked.
But that doesn’t mean that -Leaks has now become an acceptable suffix which can be ramrodded onto any story about the unauthorised release of sensitive information. And yet, Vatileaks is now all over the news.
Is this the start of a new Leak inspired linguistic habit, a way of encapsulating a particular kind of scandal with a new language shorthand. I do hope not. As I wrote earlier this year, my loathing of the -Gate suffix was not helped by the Horsegate fiasco, and recent events in Downing Street, involving the Chief Whip and his bicycle, saw the arrival of Gategate, surely the nadir for -Gate and the point when, one hopes, it will finally die its natural death.
If we are ever to be freed from Gate, please do not let Leaks come into its place. We don’t want a language scandal called Leaksgate, now do we?
The popular smartphone messaging app WhatsApp has inspired a new word in the Dutch dictionary. Whatsappen, a verb meaning to send an electronic message, will be included in the online Van Dalen dictionary from October.
I know that WhatsApp is very popular and is constantly at the top of the iTunes charts, but I must confess to being slightly surprised at its Dutch popularity. I have never come across anybody telling me they are using it, and I have certainly never heard anybody drop it into conversation in a generic Googling type way. So I suspect this may be a development in the Dutch language that we will not be seeing replicated in English any time soon. It has also been quite fun reading the Dutch coverage using Google instant traslation, as Whatsappen translates somewhat bizarrely as ‘What Juices’.
I also wonder whether other popular apps will start to find their way into the dictionary. After all, causing rampant carnage may sound less offensive if people simply say they were ‘Angry Birdsing’.
It’s nice when a new word emerges from an unlikely source. Technology, social media, politics – they are often the lifeblood of neologisms and new usages. So it is a great pleasure to welcome the Lesula to the lexicon.
It is known by the local Mbole people as Lesula, a word which is now globally familiar. This is a relief, as it is hard to imagine its scientific appendage, Cercopithecus lomamiensis, tripping off the tongue quite so easily.
The word itself seems destined for dictionary status and and is sure of its place in the English language of the future. I am pleased this should be guaranteed despite the fact it will probably not be widely used once this publicity blizzard has passed. I also like the fact that is is not a new word for a new concept and is instead a new word for something very, very old, but previously unknown. It is a specialised word, definitively describing something new, and I expect to see it acknowledged officially before too long.
But it is not the name for which this story will ultimately be remembered. It is the picture that has shot around the world of a plaintive looking money staring out into space. And I suspect people will remember that picture long after they have forgotten what it is called.
Wordability 