I hope all our Lovatts onliners enjoyed Christmas and I wish you all the best for 2011 – health, happiness and the best of luck if you’re entering our puzzle competitions!
The New Year is a good time to look at new words entering the dictionary, and they come from all different sources. We need to keep up with this vocabulary so that we know what the younger generation is talking about.
The world of technology is constantly creating new terms, and some of them will be familiar to you computer users, such as facebooking, meaning to spend time communicating on the online social network Facebook. To defriend is to remove a name from a list of friends, especially from Facebook.
Being distracted from driving by texting on a mobile phone is known as being intexticated (text/intoxicated)
Then there’s media jargon, A fauxmance (faux/romance) is a fake romance, often when celebrities pretend to be romantically involved, for publicity purposes while bromance is a close platonic relationship between men.
The recession is also changing the way we speak. Real estate jargon now uses phrases such as ghost estate, an unfinished housing development abandoned due to the downturn. Housing bubble means your house is worth a lot less than it used to be.
Recent events such as the FIFA World Cup in South Africa in July popularised the vuvuzela, that annoying instrument that drowned out the singing and gave headaches to many. It’s a plastic horn that makes a very loud monotone sound and I hope it doesn’t catch on.
Some of the new words that have been added in the Oxford English Dictionary recently are chillax – to tell somebody to take it easy (chill/relax), or they might be told to take a chill pill.
Weird and wonderful these words may be, but don’t worry – they haven’t made it into our crosswords yet, except for the word rort, a word familiar to Australians and New Zealanders but has only recently crossed to the northern hemisphere. To rort is to engage in a sharp practice, or to pull a con trick. In politics it is ballot-rigging (or branch-stacking).
Happy puzzling!
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