Walk into a coffee shop on any high street today and you’re confronted by an amazing array of caffeine-connected choices: flat white, red eye and doppio to name a few. We’ve become coffee connoisseurs with our own particular preferences for skinny or full fat, dry or wet. Yet the words we use to describe our favourite latte or cappuccino are fairly recent. We’ve only started to use them in the last five years or so as we’ve embraced the coffee culture of Australia and New Zealand (flat white), New York (red eye) and Italy (doppio). New trends demand new words and these global linguistic influences have quickly percolated into our daily routines.
Like no other human activity, language holds up a mirror to our modern fascinations, insecurities and obsessions. English is forever caught in a creative frenzy of reinvention. But how does a publisher navigate this streaming torrent of language when preparing a dictionary or thesaurus? They can take the all-out approach of the online oversharer and aim to include as many words and explanations as possible (to potential groans of TMI).
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