New year is when the Oxford English Dictionary releases the list of words that made it into its next edition — an event that, for word-nerds, is the equivalent of finding out who has made it into the England team.
For 2010, the line-up is looking frisky. Simples, staycation, hatinator: a useful jumble of fashion innovations (“hatinator” is a tiny hat worn at a ludicrous angle), teen slang (“simples” is a way of making the word “simple” a bit more complicated — the kind of ultimately pointless endeavour that adolescents so enjoy) and social developments (“staycation” being mankind’s heroic attempt to make “resentful, sweaty Augusts at home” look like the thrusting lifestyle decision of a true social maverick and not the sad consequence of having spaffed all your pay cheques on a heady combination of gas, bread, plumbers and VAT).
It’s not just words, of course. Last week the Financial Times conducted a census on state-of-the-art clich?s, concluding that the power-banality of 2009 was “the elephant in the room”. The irony with the phrase “elephant in the room” is, of course, that when someone uses the phrase “elephant in the room”, the elephant in the room instantly becomes how much everyone else in the room is thinking, “I hate the person who just said ‘elephant in the room’. Everything he says is like someone pushing bad porridge in my ears. I wish there was an elephant in the room. It might kill him. And I could sell the footage to You’ve Been Framed. That would make today good.”
Personally, these lexical reckonings gave me pause to consider which new words have entered my life during 2009 — and which clich?s I have come lazily to depend on, like an old pair of slippers, or a faithful dog or, erm, some heroin.
Words-wise it has been a good crop, each new one arriving from a different acquaintance in much the same way that, in your teenage years, you build up a collection of borrowed earrings and half-used make-up from friends. Gracie gave me the best possible present this year, with an introduction to the word “spaff” — as in, “stop spaffing on about how much you fancy the fox in Fantastic Mr Fox. He’s an animated teenage animal. It’s wrong. They’ll take your kids away.”
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As a word, “spaff” has all the alveolar ejective fricative pleasure of “spunking” but, crucially, without seeming rude.
Similarly useful is “SCREAM!”, which I inherited from Bad Paul and Bitchy Greg. While “SCREAM!” is technically more of a decisive blow for heavy-handed capitalisation and exclamation marks than a new word, it does makes a mere “scream” look like a distinctly lacklustre relation, and can be used both in joy (“New series of Celebrity Big Brother — SCREAM!”) and sorrow (“Just launched a failed coup against Gordon Brown — SCREAM!”).
Perhaps the most important words, however, have been “ROFL” and “lulz”. As a language, English had been suffering some manner of crisis when it came to words concerning amusement. Pretty much everything we had was either lame or twee. The action of being amusing has a panoply of mortifying descriptors: “joking”, “wisecracking”, “jesting”, “quipping”. They all reek of sclerotic Radio 4 panel shows, on lukewarm Saturdays, that smell of Punt, or Dennis.
Meanwhile, I would be horrified if someone claimed ever to have heard me “giggle”, “chuckle”, “titter”, “chortle” or “guffaw”. Granted, “laugh” is a perfectly decent word — but one would hope that we’d have more than one option when it came to the second best activity available to humans, after having a cheese sandwich.
Therefore, the advent of ROFL (it’s an internet acronym for “Rolls On the Floor Laughing”) and “lulz” (its etymology is complicated and involves people who would genuinely put “November 09: achieved the position of 56th Level Mage” on their CV. Just take it from me — it’s an internet thing that means anything done for a laugh) are cause for jubilee.
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Not only do they quadruple our amusement-word resources, but the fact that 34-year-old mums are now smugly using gaming slang would repulse most gamers. Which is of itself super-lulz, and causes me to ROFL all the way to my ROFLcopter, which I intend to fly right over the Lulz of Kintyre while eating a Bird’s Eye potato ROFL.
When it comes to the clich?s in my life, I have taken, as my template, my father, who has managed to whittle down 90 per cent of his conversation to “it’s one of them” and “that’s the one”.
“It’s one of them” is largely an utterance of shrugging acceptance: illness, the continued non-winning of the lottery, the loss of half a Rich Tea biscuit in a cup of tea. When our nan died, we found dad on the back doorstep, Guinness in one hand, fag in the other, crying. “It’s one of them,” he said, eventually. “It’s one of them.”
“That’s the one,” on the other hand, is primarily an exclamation of approval or joy. There’s chips for tea, Dad. “That’s the one!”
At the beginning of the year I started using both phrases around my siblings, sarcastically, to make fun of the old man. By the summer, however, something had slipped in my heart and I was using both in earnest, having found how truly useful they are; particularly around small children who ask a lot of questions. Ironically, as far as my dad is concerned, this sequence of events comes under the headings of both “that’s the one” and “it’s one of them”. It’s the two-handed clich? system that’s hard to beat.
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Of similar usefulness is the phrase “that’s just the way I roll”, which I got from my brother John. This is particularly effective as an answer to genuinely well-founded criticism of crucial decisions and/or major personality flaws. Used in conjunction with “I am as God made me, sir” — best delivered in a very poorly executed West Country accent — there is little to nothing that a vexed, even borderline tearful, commentator can do to penetrate your shield.
On the other hand, when I am the vexed, borderline tearful commentator, an indignant “Hey, man!” has got me through more than one bad conversation — on one occasion, with an armed policeman outside 10 Downing Street, who was trying to stop me having a picture taken while I smoked a fag.
And when “Hey, man!” has wrought its magic and you wish to conclude smugly with a phrase that demonstrates that your plan was right all along, “ipso facto gazebo” is an unalloyed pleasure to utilise; particularly if you’re a) owlishly drunk, and b) your plans included, at some juncture, a point you wanted to make about a gazebo.
Alas, during 2009, none of mine did. But who knows how many gazebos I will be owlishly drunk in in 2010?