Tag: new_words

An Omnishambles at the Heart of Downing Street?

When I heard that the recent run of Coalition policies was being described as an Omnishambles, I thought that a great new political word had been coined. The fact that I was wrong says a great deal about the political animals currently at the top in the UK.

Labour leader Ed Miliband’s use of Ominshambles during Prime Minister’s Questions in April was not a new piece of linguistic dexterity coined just for the occasion. He was actually quoting political comedy The Thick of It, and in particular, its spin meister Malcolm Tucker.

The good news for Mr Miliband is that the word has stuck. The Omnishambles Budget, the Omnishambles of other recent incidents – this word summing up a number of things going wrong simultaneously is now appearing on radio and in print. It shows once again the power that one word can have to encapsulate a mood and dominate a political discusson.

But what does the rush to use Ominshambles tell use about the users? Are they using it because it is perfect and truly sums up the current situation? Or are they dong it simply to be trendy, to show they are in the know about hip political comedies which are clearly very familiar to our political leaders and they want to be part of the club.

If it is the latter, which seems likely, especially as I have heard it being delivered with an almost smug smirk, then I am happy to admit that I am not in the know and don’t have to slavishly jump on a bandwagon to show that I am part of any clique.

Omnishambles has the power to be a very useful piece of shorthand for the Opposition, and if it enters common usage, then this is a linguistic game well played. But if its in-joke nature annoys people and makes them feel cut off from our politicians and the joke they are sharing with each other, then its usage could backfire. In fact, it could reinforce the sense that behind closed doors, the leading politicians are all great mates, performing for the cameras but sharing interests away from them, and that could serve to highlight the distance people are increasingly feeling from the goings-on in Westminster.

Shwopping Presents a New Swapportunity

What is it with the need to create new words out of ‘swap’? Earlier this year, Wordability looked at the non-word Swapportunity, which has managed to gain a degree of currency despite being made up for an American Yoplait commercial.

Now UK retailing icon Marks & Spencer has got in on the act. Its new campaign, encouraging people to bring in an old item of clothing to donate to Oxfam whenever buying something new, has prompted them to try and introduce a new word into everyday English. People are shopping and swapping, so they must be Shwopping.

The plan has, hardly surprisingly, garnered significantly publicity, with ‘shwopping’ featuring prominently in all the coverage.

Can M&S claim to have invented it? The company is certainly proud of the word, and chief executive Marc Bolland was quoted as saying: “Within 24 hours this word of ‘shwopping’ might be added to the British language.”

But I wonder whether he checked with environmental campaigners in New Zealand. After all, in December last year, The Big Shwop took place in Wellington, encouraging people to swap one item for another. So maybe not quite as original as we thought.

Personally, I am not sure about shwopping as a word. It sounds a bit to me like I was planning to swap something, but the six pints of beer I drank made it much harder for me to say it. And that would be the only way I would be likely to shwop until I dropped.

He Shoots. He Scores. Goalgasm!

When Fernando Torres rounded Barcelona’s goalkeeper to confirm Chelsea’s place in the Champions League final, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the moment would only remembered for the drama of his goal.

But no. Accompanying the goal came a shriek of delight from Sky co-commentator Gary Neville. It was so high-pitched and excessive it has shot round the internet. It has been dubbed a Goalgasm.

While it is quite clear how this delightful word came to be derived, there is actually no -gasm suffix in English which denotes an outpouring of climactic joy. Orgasm itself is derived from the French orgasme, or modern Latin orgasmus, or Greek orgasmos, from organ ‘swell or be excited’. No Or- with a neatly tucked on -gasm there then.

But this doesn’t matter. The only word which ends -gasm is the aforementioned saucy one, so using it as a suffix automatically confers the correct meaning. I could randomly make up shoegasm, chocloategasm or spoongasm, and you could immediately imagine the kind of reaction somebody would be having to buying a great new pair of shoes, eating superb chocolate, or, er, finding a lovely spoon.

Neville’s reaction is just one of a long line of over-excitable commentaries throughout the ages, while football fans like myself can look back with slight embarrassment to those moments when the emotion of a vital goal made us react in ways we’d rather forget.

So the next time you feel one of those moments coming on, just picture Gary Neville. That should soon calm you down.

Mobile Users Having A Smishing Time

You can always tell when a new word hasn’t caught on – two or three years after it is first coined, it still has inverted commas around it when hits the headlines.

So it is with Smishing, the mobile cousin of phishing. It is the practice of sending bogus text messages to people in order to con them and was actually coined in 2006 in a blog on the McAfee website. But six years later, it has still not shed its inverted commas or the sense that people are seeing it for the first time.

Smishing is currently in the news in America because of an outbreak of fake Wal-Mart related text messages. It has led to much coverage of a new type of cyber attack but all the articles confirm that despite its few years of linguistic existence, it is a term that none of us have ever heard of.

Which begs the question of why. Smishing is derived from SMS and Phishing, and simply conflates the two. Phishing is itself a conflation, though not an obvious one. It takes fishing and combines it the ph from phone phreaking, which is the art of cracking the phone network.

Despite its rather convoluted derivation, phishing works as a word. You can immediately understand it as it has the element of fishing for something until you get a catch, in this case a cyber one, and the ‘ph’ spelling makes it seem kind of techy, even if you have no idea why it is actually spelt like that.

But smishing? It doesn’t have the benefit of sounding like another word. It actually sounds pretty daft. And because of its slight ludicrousness, it is hard to imagine it being talked about with the same seriousness as its email ancestor.

So even though there is a growing problem of spam text messages landing on people’s mobiles around the world, I don’t expect to see Smishing finding its way into common vocabulary any time soon.

Culturomics: The Challenge for Wordability

I have been thinking a lot about Culturomics recently. Frankly, it has given me a headache. But it has also reminded me that if Wordability were to be up to date with ever single new word that enters the English Language, I would be glued to my keyboard the whole time and would neither eat nor sleep.

Culturomics has existed as a word and a discipline for two years. It is a very exciting linguistic development, and one that is only possible because of advances in technology. With millions of books now existing in digital format, courtesy of Google, scientists are able to analyse this vast amount of data to derive conclusions about the English language that have never previously been possible.

The first paper, published at the end of 2010 in the journal Science (free log-in needed to view the link), analysed 4% of all published material and used this to give an indication of the number of words in the English language. The estimate came out at more than a million, far more than recorded by dictionaries.

This year, a new paper by Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin and H. Eugene Stanley has given Wordability something to think about. Rejoicing in the catchy title Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death, the paper applies science to the life of words and comes up with rules to explain the birth and death of words and the evolutionary processes that govern their existence.

Leaving aside the many complex equations and use of Greek letters, the writers come to some interesting conclusions. More than 8,000 words entered the English language last year, so you can understand why Wordability will only track those that really start to hit the headlines. It also says that there is a change in the rate at which words are born and die, with more words dying off and fewer words coming in, though it says that those that do arrive have greater staying power because they describe completely new things, such as in the field of technology.

What is particularly interesting is the way that evolutionary theory can be applied to words. As the authors say, “words are competing actors in a system of finite resources”. Factors such as being favoured by modern spell checkers can given a word “reproductive fitness” and allow it to survive against other words of a similar semantic bent.

I have thought about this paper quite a lot, and find myself wondering if it will actually end up marking a point in time and that the evolutionary rules are about to change. Is the technology which allows Culturomics to flourish and these observations to be made now going to be the agent which changes that evolutionary process?

The authors say that it takes around 30-50 years for a word to be fully accepted and to either make it into a dictionary or disappear into linguistic obscurity. I wonder whether this will now change, and a new pattern will start to emerge. I have bemoaned in the past how long it sometimes takes dictionary makers to recognise words which have gained significant currency. In our interconnected world, where ideas and words can fly across the globe and become accepted almost instantly, the evolutionary pattern identified by the authors may start to change. I suspect it may become quicker for words to become accepted, and that the survival characteristics that will govern this will also change. Words that are slightly silly, that have the capacity to be shared on social networks, that describe an action people can participate in, will be the ones that evolve rapidly and see off the other competing words around them.

It is a fascinating concept that words fight the same survival battles as species on earth. In the 21st century, it will be interesting to see what factors allow them to survive.

Marmageddon – You Either Love it or Hate it

There’s a crisis in New Zealand. The country is set to run out of Marmite. And the headline writers have dubbed it ‘Marmageddon’.

In the spirit of the famous spread, you either love or hate this bit of linguistic dexterity. My feelings towards it match my sentiments towards Marmite on toast. Love it.

I think the reason that it works linguistically is because it is knowingly ludicrous and is almost taking the mickey out of itself. Its in-built sense of irony makes it a success. Of course the disappearance of Marmite off supermarket shelves is not a real apocalypse, especially as it will come back this year once the factory damaged in last year’s earthquake is repaired.

But by being called ‘Marmageddon’, the situation not only becomes easy for headline writing but is also immediately defined as lightweight, an ‘and finally’ story for the end of the news that will make everybody smile.

I don’t expect Marmageddon to last for long or to leap Linsanity-like into official lexical recognition. But wouldn’t it be great if it left a legacy of -ageddon suffixes, to be applied to any suitable words engulfed by a catastrophe. The world’s population of Llamas is becoming extinct – Llamageddon, screams the world’s press. Cotton shortages are affecting popular sleepwear – it’s Pyjamageddon.

But it probably wouldn’t work if there was a worldwide ban on the playing of Bananarama records. After all, that would hardly be a crisis.

Abadingding The Thing In The Philippines

I love it when a great word comes from an unexpected source. And I really love it when a word is so pleasing on the ear that you find you keep on wanting to use it. Such a word is Abadingding.

Politics is of course fertile territory for neologisms, and the coining of words to encpsulate specific ideas is a vital tool for getting your message across. So it is in the Philippines, where campaigners are trying everything they can think of to fight against rising fuel prices.

The current subject of their ire is parliamentarian Herminida Abad, who is accused by activists of ignoring demands for her to start deliberations on a number of bills which could bring an end to the increases.

And so the gloriously named fisherfolk alliance Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamalakaya) has coined Abadingding, defining it as “complete refusal to heed the people’s clamour in the hope it will wither away.”

The group is rather good at coining new words, with this effort coming hot on the heels of Noynoying, their tribute to the apparent inertia of President Beningo ‘Noynoy’ Aquino and defined as “doing nothing even if you have something to do”.

Noynoying is already taking physical form in Philippines, with scores of people brazenly sitting around doing nothing in public places to make a point.

Are these words great examples of lexical inventiveness being used effectively in political campaigning? Absolutely. Will they ever cross the borders of the Philippines to receive international lexical acclamation? Probably not.

But just imagine if a leading politician in the UK or the US ever found themselves accused of Noynoying or Abadingding when they failed to deliver on vital legislation. What a colourful linguistic moment that would be.

Chatterboxing is the New Way to Talk

The advent of Twitter has spawned many Twittish words, but the latest seems to be one of the more bizarre.

Second screens are one of the trendy subjects at the moment in the mobile phone and tablet worlds. This is the idea that while you are in front of the television, you have your second screen on your lap or in your hand and are merrily interacting with it while you watch.

One way that people interact is to chat to others on Twitter about the programme they are viewing, and this social interaction becomes as important to them as the programme itself. And what are they doing? They are chatterboxing.

It’s not clear to me how this word has come about. I think it is more than just taking the well-established word chatterbox and making it into a verb, because that implies excessive talking, and chatterboxing involves no talking at all. Instead, I suspect it could be a play on words, chatting while watching the box, an almost defiantly old-fashioned word to help with a new habit. But however it has come about, it is an activity that will stay and expand, and I suspect the word is here to stay.

Online dictionaries are not yielding definitions at the moment, though they’re soon likely to catch up. Having said that, there is a definition on the Urban Dictionary. It suggests that chatterboxing is “the act of talking shit”.

So it’s pretty accurate then.

Cyberchondria and Babe Magnets Come of Age

I read about a word this week and got very excited about writing about it. An article in London’s Evening Standard, about people self-diagnosing themselves on the internet, started with the line: “I have learned a new word this week: cyberchondria”.

Fantastic, I thought, your new word must be my new word, and what a great word it is. Except that the writer and I were both behind the times.

It turns out that cyberchondria has been around since the turn of the century. It appears to have debuted in 2001, with the BBC website writing about it, while by 2003 it had been discussed in The British Medical Journal.

So why am I writing about it, I hear you ask. You just write about brand new words and usages, and this is patently not new, so go and find something else. Well that’s true, but it seems that the wheels of the Oxford English Dictionary move a great deal slower than the wheels of Wordability.

I am writing about it because the OED has just announced the details of the latest quarterly update to its online dictionary, and guess what its headline is. Correct! Cyberchondriac has now been added to the dictionary.

Now I know that the OED has specific criteria for including a word in its dictionary, relating to length of time, frequency and breadth of use and an almost unquantifiable sense of currency, meaning that people don’t have to explain it when they use it. But I do wonder whether they are sometimes taking a bit too long to introduce things.

Wordability has recently written about Tebowing and Linsanity, both of which are already recognised by the Global Language Monitor as words because of their massive usage. Surely then, they should have been included in this OED update as they clearly meet all the criteria required for a new word, as discussed above. But they are not yet there, and it is impossible to say how long it might take for them to appear. And I will also be keeping an eye out for Ineptocracy, which is by some distance the most searched term on Wordability.

Cyberchondria is one of a number of words that I feel should have been included long ago. Others include: babe magnet, a man who is very attractive to women; vodcast, in effect a video podcast; and unspellable, which sounds like it has been around forever.

The OED is the ultimate arbiter of language and of course it has to be absolutely certain about a word’s validity before it will include it. Its quarterly updates allow it to respond to changes in language on an ongoing basis. But the speed with with words are consistently exploding around the world makes me think that their road to official acceptance is going to have to become shorter.

Brogrammers Making Computing Cool

There is a cliched image of computer programmers. It involves words such as geek or nerd, and images of quiet and bespectacled individuals sitting in corners, headphones plugged in, reams of code spiralling down the screen in front of them.

But no more. It seems there is a new breed of computer whizz, cooler and with attitude. These coding experts can drink heavily and party with the best of them, but they still work hard. And they are not programmers. They are Brogrammers.

The word, bringing the “bro” greeting together with “programmer”, is now beginning to gain currency across the internet, and there is a burgeoning Facebook group with more than 22,000 members. But it is not universally popular, with others criticising the term and worrying that it will make a male-dominated profession even harder for women to break into. And they argue that it is a terrible word.

Is it terrible? Well it is funny, and I can see it catching on in a niche way. However, the accusation of it being sexist is entirely valid. It could end up growing as a kind of polarising term for different kinds of coders, rather than as the joke that it clearly is now. Nevertheless, I think it is here to stay, for a time at least.

But I am much more entertained by the linguistic possibilities that it suggests for the future. What if we could apply this subtle change to a number of other words? Just think, we could have:

  • Advancing in your career while partying – Bromotion
  • Sleeping with a really cool guy – Brocreation
  • Dietary supplements taken by heavy drinkers – Brobiotics

I’d better stop now. You’ll soon be needing Brotection from any more of this nonsense.