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’. Collins, a rival dictionary-maker, chose fauxmance, with much the same supposed meaning. But if you spoke of Peter indulging in a fauxmance, you would most likely be met by the response, ‘I’m sorry?’
These are at best vogue usages which, if the playthings of a week or two, will soon evaporate. Two nominations from Collins for the year are bigotgate and Cleggstasy. The former referred, through a rather tired suffix, to the events of 28 April in Rochdale, which, if confirming Gordon Brown’s disastrous image during the election campaign, will scarcely live longer than the name of Gillian Duffy, the heroine of the moment. As for Cleggstasy, it denotes the unreasonable enthusiasm with which Nick Clegg was received during the televised debates between political leaders before the election. It may have given us the coalition, but it is a jokey word easier to use in print (once, or twice at most) than in speech.
These vogue words are examples of what are still called portmanteau formations, even though we no longer use portmanteaus. Jamming together words is the fashionable mechanism for generating new ones this year. Acronyms used to be the thing. A portmanteau formation was chosen by the learned American Dialect Society as its own top word of 2010: spillcam. This is the name for the undersea camera that recorded the oil leaking from the BP well into the Gulf of Mexico. Again, this is practically a proper name and will hardly outlive the oil slick about which Barack Obama made such a fuss.
To him can be attributed the popularity of two more of the top ten words from the American Dialect Society: shellacking and snowmageddon. The latter was no more than a passing joke about the heavy snowfall in Washington in February, but shellacking has old gangster-fiction connections. ‘These two bums that Lefty shellacked were members of Red Karfola’s gang,’ wrote C.F. Coe in 1930, in his novel Gunman, published by Victor Gollancz in what has been called the first modern paperback format, retailing at the fairly steep price of three shillings.
But shellac had been used in English for 300 years, and was originally a varnish (from French laque en écailles, ‘lac in thin plates’). Lac, a Hindi word in origin, is a kind of gum exuded by a tree punctured by an insect. From this gum we derive our word lacquer and, from its properties as a red dye, the colour crimson lake.
Another portmanteau word was the first choice of the New Oxford American Dictionary for 2010: refudiate, taken from a mistake by Sarah Palin in a Twitter message where she called on ‘peaceful Muslims’ to ‘refudiate’ a planned mosque near the site of the September 11 attacks in New York. The Oxford panel in America saw it as a useful amalgam of refute and repudiate. Unconvincingly it likened Mrs Palin’s blunder to Warren G. Harding’s use of normalcy in his 1920 presidential campaign slogan: ‘A return to normalcy’. He may have been mocked for the word, but it did exist (as governance did before Harold Wilson used it in his book title).
One word pinpointed by Collins that I am afraid is used genuinely in discourse is simples!, coming from that series of advertisements featuring a meerkat with a Russian accent. Indeed the supposititious meerkat has published an autobiography, which is selling well. Yet the word is merely a catchphrase, now used by people in a doomed attempt to be amusing. It is no more a new word than the peeps used, in the 1980s, by Harry Enfield’s Stavros.
For me, the runner-up for word of 2010 is on. Last year it was clear that British speakers of English had capitulated to the American usage when talking of ‘a shop on Oxford Street’ instead of ‘in Oxford Street. This month the ascendancy of on was confirmed by a letter I saw in the Daily Telegraph thanking the person who returned an envelope, marked ‘found on the street’. It should be ‘in the street’ but on is the cuckoo in the nest.
Among other contenders, such as any time soon, pay down, and all about (‘It’s all about accountability and transparency’), the outright winner is post. It derives from the prefix post-, which after all was attached to verbs by the ancient Romans to modify meaning (posthabere, postponere). Its modern, annoying use is as a preposition meaning ‘subsequent to’ or ‘since’. The OED noticed an example in the Times from 1991: ‘Post the rights issue, BAe hopes it will be able to live on its existing borrowings.’ Scarcely a day goes by now without sighting it. The headline of a football website when Real Madrid was defeated last month was: ‘Post El Clasico: It’s wasn’t all about Barcelona being super,’ or, as its manager Jose Mourinho commented: ‘One team played very good, one team very bad.’ Simples!
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