The year in words

As I was slipping a pudding into the water to boil a bellowing noise like the questing beast in Malory made me jump. But I did not drop it. ‘My word of the year,’ said my husband, blowing like a tuba-player through a rolled up copy of the Radio Times. ‘Vuvuzela. We’d never heard of it till this summer. It’s a thing and it has no other name.’

Despite the annoying nature of the thing and the imitation of it by my husband, he is right. It is strange that Oxford University Press chose big society. Not only does no one know its meaning, but it is practically a proprietary name. Other words on its shortlist of 12 were stranger. Los 33, taken from the note attached to a drill-bit by the Chilean mine survivors, looks memorable, but how would you pronounce it? Double dip was notable for not, fortunately, being the defining word of the year. Boris bike is a popular usage, but it must surely count as dialect, being confined to London, where such bicycles are to be had for hire.

The reason, as I have mentioned before, that dictionaries announce new words is to draw attention to themselves for low commercial ends. Their publicity people know that newspapers are easily bamboozled into running stories on new words in dictionaries, as if dictionaries, not speakers, gave legitimacy to words. Who now uses neologisms identified by Oxford in 2008, such as moofer (‘mobile out-of-office worker’), scuppie (‘socially conscious, upwardly-mobile person’) and funt (‘financially untouchable’)?

One can scarcely imagine a circumstance in which some of the candidates could be used in speech without the interlocutor mishearing or asking for clarification. Showmance is an OUP contender for word of 2010, meaning ‘a romantic relationship that develops between actors during the course of making a film etc, or between participants in a TV show, either real or engineered for the sake of publicity’.