The rise of Newglish: an evolving language

The rise of Newglish: an evolving language by Laura Simpson (http://news.uk.msn.com/the_rise_of_newglish.aspx)


It is only a five-letter word but it has got the bigwigs at McDonald’s all of a McFlurry [HAHAHAHA!]. The fast food giant is so unhappy with this offensive newcomer to common parlance that it is calling on the British public to support its bid to alter the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the very bastion of all that is proper and correct in our language.
The word? McJob – hardly an expletive [haha!], but its definition as "an unstimulating low-paid job with few prospects" is one that doesn’t quite fit with McDonald’s global brand or, presumably, its recruitment programme. Outlandish as it sounds, McJob has been in the OED since 2001, but the restaurant chain yesterday launched a petition attempting to update the definition in a way deemed less insulting to its employees.

War of words

Whether the might of McDonald’s can hold sway with an institution that has set the standard for the way we use words for over a century remains to be seen, but what the campaign does highlight is the English language as we speak it is advancing at a colossal pace. Even the meanings of words are changing to an extent that ambiguity is inflecting our conversations and no one seems quite sure whether their utterances are in vocabular vogue or if they constitute a social faux pas.

This week Jeremy Clarkson felt the wrath of media watchdog Ofcom after using the term “ginger beer” – rhyming slang for queer – disparagingly about a car on Top Gear. But last year Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles managed to dodge accusations of homophobia by effectively redefining the word “gay” after using it to describe a ringtone he did not like, insisting in modern banter it mean rubbish or lame. The BBC accepted his definition.

So, with words such as chav, bling and stylee making the grade and being included in the OED over the past year, could it be that an entirely new form of English is evolving – a language shaped by urban-speak, American teen flicks and uber-modern advances in technology? If the way you talk and write is enough to send your computer spell check into meltdown it could be the case that your usage of English, with all its nuances and colloquialisms, is developing faster than technology is.

Say what?

In his novel 1984, George Orwell depicted a world where English was being slowly superseded by Newspeak, a language which sought to reflect the principles and ideologies of a rapidly altered society. We may not yet be at the stage when we use “ungood” to mean bad, as Orwell’s fictional work envisioned, but if the author were alive today he may be alarmed at just how prescient his future language was. Entries to the OED over the past year now mean we can now not only be surfers browsing the internet, but “cybrarians” who travel the “Infobahn” to retrieve information [=))], leading “virtualized” lives. We like our discs to be “rewritable” and if we make a mistake we know we can always “undelete” or “uninstall”.

All these newfangled definitions and extraneous words are enough to flummox even the most streetwise of lexical minds. But with so many “Newglish” terms floating around, it is easy to land yourself in a conversational quandary. Are your words actually in the dictionary? Do they mean what you think they mean? The OED says access to its online service is available to most public library members in England and Northern Ireland if you need to check your vocab. In the meantime, here is a quick guide to 20 of the most bizarre, controversial and ingenious new words that, according to the OED, did not officially exist a year ago – and a few suggestions for a dictionary of the future.

20 new words you probably didn’t know existed

1) anoraky – boring, overly studious, unfashionable, nerdy

2) automagically – something that is done automatically in an ingenious or inexplicable way, as if by magic.

3) bimbette – a young, attractive woman thought to lack intelligence or distinctive personality

4) bippy – the buttocks or backside

5) celebutante – a celebrity socialite (ie Paris Hilton)

6) doobrey – a thingummy (a what?)

7) Eeyorish – pessimistic, gloomy

8) fakelore [=))] – specious stories with stereotypically folkloric elements falsely presented as genuine folklore

9) flob – a piece of spittle and mucus that has been spat out

10) freakazoid – a bizarre or freakish person

11) fugly – a very ugly person (derived from an expletive and ugly) [isn't this from Mean Girls???]

12) hacktivist – a hacker with a social or political message to propagate

13) hinky – mainly police slang used to mean nervous or uneasy

14) irritainment – broadcast material that is irritating yet still entertaining

15) looky-loo – a person who views with no intention to buy, or out of curiosity

16) scooby – as in “not to have a scooby” – not to have a clue

17) technopreneur – an entrepreneur in the technology fields

18) tighty-whities – men’s snug-fitting white cotton underpants

19) tweener – a person or thing falling between two recognized categories or types

20) twonk – an idiot, fool

Word wish-list (useful and quirky terms that could be included)

1) blown out – a state of being dumped, avoided or let down by a former date or pal

2) beer jacket – the invisible layer of warmth that forms around one’s body after consuming alcohol and stepping out into the cold, particularly favoured by revellers in the north of England

3) disco dirt – the unexplained black residue left on shoes, legs and feet after a night out

4) dudette – female form of dude, a chummy name for a young woman

5) Facebucked – someone who signs up for social networking and discovers they really don’t
have any friends [ ansama! =))]

6) predictoff – a word completely out of context in an SMS message – created by predictive text messaging

7) schmee – rubbish, lame, substandard (ie. “the UK didn’t win Eurovision because the song was a bit schmee”)

8) telecrastination – the process of screening one's calls and deliberating whether to answer

9) unfan – someone who takes more pleasure from other football teams losing, than their own team winning [=))]

10) Wiinjured – someone who strains themselves playing Nintendo Wii [HAHA! Maraming ganito a =))]

What do you think? Should we embrace new words - or is English rapidly becoming an unfathomable language? Have your say.

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