New words for a new year
If one of your New Year resolutions is to expand your vocabulary, 2016 saw many new and useful additions to the English dictionary. Early in the year, Judy Murray revealed her son Andy and his wife Kim call her ‘Glam-ma’ – a word used to describe a new breed of grandmother who is successful, glamorous and young-looking. Around Halloween, ‘Trumpkin’ was coined to describe a pumpkin made to look like Donald Trump, often with hysterical results.
Anyone with teenage children will recognise the term ‘ghosting’ – ending a romantic relationship by suddenly breaking off contact. Then there’s FOMO (fear of missing out), which leads sufferers to compulsively post attractive or wacky photos of themselves on social media to make their life seem more interesting. Another popular word with this demographic is ‘lifehack’ – a tip on how to make life better or easier.
Office workers have long had to contend with the glass ceiling but now there’s a military equivalent – the ‘brass ceiling’ to describe the point at which someone, usually a woman, cannot get any higher in their career in the armed forces.
Personally, I like ‘verklempt’ – meaning choked up or overcome with emotion. It’s been widely used by Yiddish speakers for years but is now coming into mainstream use.
All these are potentially useful additions to our vocabulary but many of the new words seem too contrived or try hard and it remains to be seen whether they’ll catch on. I’m thinking ‘twag’ (wife or girlfriend of an entrepreneur in the tech field), ‘shacket’ (apparently a light jacket, similar to a shirt), ‘glunge’ (fashion that manages to combine both glamour and grunge) and ‘genervacation’ (a holiday taken by parents and their grown-up children that is paid for by the parents) here.
