How can you tell that a word has passed from the vernacular into respectable usage?
One certain measure is the absence of inverted commas on The Irish Times letters page. "Sir, I suppose many people find the 'trendy' columns by Donald Clarke very 'cool'. These are, no doubt, the same people who enjoy 'rap' music." (You can add your own awful pun to close off this unfair caricature of an admirable institution.)
Sadly, this gauge swings a little too far towards the conservative end of the spectrum. Obviously, it would be better if no new words ever gained the official imprimatur. The less we hear of "Lol", "nom" and "amazeballs" the better. That last one is particularly infuriating. "Amazeballs" is now used exclusively by people who think they're implicitly making fun of the sort of people who use "Amazeballs". That's you! You're that sort of person. If you don't stop it I'll "pen" a letter to The Irish Times.
If we must recognise shifts in language (and I suppose we must) then the annual list of new inclusions to the Oxford English Dictionary is a better guide than any other.
The headline news this year concerns a genus of tropical weevil. A shiny little customer known as the “zyzzyva” has knocked aside “zythum” (an ancient Egyptian beer, apparently) to become last word in the new edition.
"No one knows where zyzzyva came from," Fiona McPherson, new words editor at the OED, told the Times. "There are some sources saying it makes a reference to the noises made by the weevil."
I'm suspicious, Fiona. It sounds as if the weevil community may be adopting a similar strategy to those companies, eager to appear first in the Yellow Pages, that used to call themselves things such as "Aardvark Insurance" or "Aaron Drains and Guttering". There is only one way to beat a "Zyz" opening. Expect rivals in the beetle community to discover a Zzzoktle or a Zzyptle some time very soon.
The most banal observation to be made is that we suddenly seem to have got very interested in tennis. One can only imagine the battles that preceded the (timely, considering the imminent arrival of Wimbledon) admittance of an array of terms derived from that sport. Bafflingly, many of them were current when Ken Rosewall still challenged for the title.
We are now permitted to use “changeover” in the sense of swapping ends. “Forced error” joins the unforced kind in the dictionary. Four decades after John McEnroe was described as a “superbrat” by the British tabloids that word has finally been included.
Sir, I was “gobsmacked” to discover that “superbrat” is now in the OED. Can we expect such “trendy” terms as “groovy” and “jeans” to receive similar unwelcome acceptance?
This feels more like a shift in lexicographic policy than an acknowledgement of rising interest in racket sports. Advocates for 10-pin bowling within the OED canteen will be angling for the inclusion of “super washout” and “Greek church”.
Strategic realignment
The belated inclusion of “changing table” – something you use when swapping nappies, presumably – also feels like the result of a strategic realignment. Those things have been around for ages.
What are really of interest are the voguish buzz-terms that captured recent zeitgeists. We are now officially allowed to employ “woke” in the sense of being socially aware. It takes at least five years of usage for a word to make it in. It is, therefore, a little surprising that “woke”, popularised by the Black Lives Matter movement, has met the qualifications so soon.
We also welcome the relatively rapid ascension of “hygge”. That Danish-derived word suggesting warmth and comfort seems to have attacked the style pages only within the last year, but the good people at the OED have traced English-language use back to the 1960s. “Post-truth” makes it in mere months after its tipping point in the last US Presidential election.
The worry is that some new word will fall foul of what film enthusiasts don’t really call the Molly Ringwald Effect. David Thomson, creator of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, maintains the same policy towards entries as the OED: once you get in, you are never cut.
So, Molly Ringwald, once on the cover of Time, now a footnote to the 1980s, maintains her place beside Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis and Ingmar Bergman. In just a few years' time, "hygge" and "woke" may have gone the way of lost terms from medieval heraldry.
This is not to say we shouldn't argue for the soonest possible inclusion of "covfefe". If nothing else, Donald Trump's inexplicable brain burp, tweeted in the ungodly hours, will give future contestants on a revived Call My Bluff much to chew over.
Is it Hannah Gordon’s drunken matador or is it…
