LONDON: Those of us interested in the upkeep of the nation’s word hoard always look forward to the annual unveiling of the Collins dictionary “words of the year” list. Happily, last week’s trawl through the latest batch of neologisms was full of good stuff.
Naturally, “Corbynomics”, aka “the economic policies advocated by the UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn”, headed the roster, along with “dadbod”, defined, to my considerable disquiet, as “an untoned and slightly plump male physique”, but there was also room for “manspreading” (“the act or an instance of a male passenger on a bus or train splaying his legs in a way that denies space to the passenger sitting next to him”) and “clean eating”, which apparently means to follow a diet containing only natural foods, low in sugar and fat.
Curiously enough, despite a year’s eavesdropping on the upper decks of buses and in football stadium crowds, I had heard of only two of them.
All of which raises the doubtless unfathomable question of where new words come from, who mints them and who – most importantly of all – makes a point of transmitting news of their discovery to the language police.
After all, if the Collins compilers are to be believed, there must have been a moment when, in some train chugging through the north country or in a double-decker inching its way along the Wandsworth Road, someone with not the least idea of the consequences for lexicography turned a hostile gaze on the person in the next seat and instructed them to “stop bloody well manspreading”.
The question of linguistic origins is always worth filing, if only because so many people who use language are so fanatically determined both to advance its boundaries and claim the credit for this extension. There is, for example, a wonderful moment in the American teen film Mean Girls in which one of the characters, fond of describing things as “so fetch”, is informed by her friends that there is no way the expression is going to catch on.
Three-quarters of the words proudly added to the language in 2015 will be forgotten a decade hence, gone the way of “He’s a pip” (1940s slang for “I don’t fancy yours much”).
For, in the majority of cases, it is an example of a genuinely popular cultural impetus in action: something that comes, more or less, from nowhere, has no connection to the mass-market forces that grind us down, and exists for just as long as people find it relevant.
Inevitably, quite a few of these expressions tend to be frowned upon by polite society – see the tremendous fuss occasioned by words such as “pram face” (teenage single parent bent over her baby carriage) – yet, in the majority of cases, you can’t help noticing they have a vigour denied the euphemisms of the drawing room.
The pleasure this kind of invention affords is limitless. It was George Orwell, after all, who once said he would sooner have written a popular song such as Come to the pub next door(“Come where the boss is a bit of a sport / Come to the pub next door”) than any amount of highbrow poetry. – The Independent