The English Language...A Work In Progress
Sitting at the traffic lights on Saturday morning, one of our local buses went past with the slogan "Oh Golly! New bus routes coming soon," plastered along the side. It was one of those moments of syncronicity because we'd been talking about words that come and go, Id made the remark at work that you never hear anybody say the words "golly" or "splendid," these days do you?
Nathalie has recently started saying "Gosh!" I think she's using it quite innocently but I did notice on a music web site last week that t-shirts bearing the phrase "Oh Gosh!" are becoming the latest ironic fashion item.
Television and newspapers love to use certain 'insider' phrases but often they are lagging far behind popular useage, despite the technology available. Why do newspapers insist on printing a persons age after their name? Mr Cyril Windpipe, 37, of Battersea, London, was charged with manslaughter. Does Cyril's age make the crime easier or harder to understand?
Words evolve on a daily basis. Here a some examples of words that entered the English language in 2004:
shopgrifting - noun :the activity of purchasing something from a shop, using it, and then returning it within a specific period in order to get a full refund
retrosexual - noun: a heterosexual male who spends as little money as possible on his personal appearance and lifestyle because he has very little interest in how he looks and what he wears
grief tourist noun: a person who travels specifically to visit the scene of a tragedy or disaster
and one I'm sure we've all tried at one time or another
egosurfing noun :the activity of searching the World Wide Web for occurrences of your own name
Words move in and out of fashion, like fashion itself. Janis listens to a lot of radio plays, audiobooks, her favourites include P.G Wodehouse, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie. Christie writing in the 1930's and 1940's likes to have Hercule Poirot ejaculating a lot, it's not a phrase that you'd write today - unless you were working on a script for a porno!
3 comments:
Paul, I don't know whether to curse you or to bless you!!
You may well have ruined my future viewing of "Poirot" since I can never look at David Suchet in the same way ever again.
But, then again, you have furnished me with a word that defines me exactly : retrosexual.
My favourite neologism is "testiculate" : verb, intransitive, to wave one's arms around whilst talking bollocks.
I think I'm a closet retrosexual as well Shy - perhaps we should come out together!
Love testiculate what a great word.
Sometimes it is amazing how slowly words enter the dictionary! In the 14 September 2006 update the OED lists islamophobia and scrote for the first time! Although not in the same breath.
I say Crumbs! And Crikey! It started ironically and now I can't help it...
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