I just told a colleague he looked a little hangdog – trying to be supportive, you know – and he said he didn’t understand what I meant. I had to say he looked a bit glum, like Eeyore. He would be around 10 or 15 years younger than me: what is becoming of everyone’s vocabulary??
Mind you, I myself have discovered a few new words this week, and not in a foreign language, either. To be fair, they are neologisms, and I love them.
I came across them both in the Guardian, which is my left wing Liberal news media bubble of choice.
The first was the leguminati, a secretive sect dedicated to increasing the world’s consumption of beans, peas, lentils, etc, to increase the health of the population and of the Earth itself. This is surely a laudable endeavor, even though the associated increase in personal gas emissions does put the wind up me slightly (!) As an aside, one of my offspring expressed shock and disappointment this week on discovering that the methane emissions put out by NZ’s cows comes not from farts, but from burps. Why does this matter? Of course, it doesn’t. And yet…
The other word has been named in the Australian Macquarie dictionary as the word of the year: enshittification. I love this word even more than my favourite of 2016, which now feels like a golden era but was awful at the time, with Brexit and Trump V1: omnishambles.
I think we’ve all seen this process in action, with Facebook, Twitter (that was),Ticktock, and Instagram. No longer are we getting pictures of our friends having fun on tropical island holidays, inspiring FOMO at worst, now it’s all ads and conspiracy theories.
The term became so popular, the inventor elaborated on the idea:
Why are these related invented terms so much better than saying “everything is going to shit’? This is the theory from the dictionary:
Anyway, we don’t want to spoil the magic by being too intellectual. Might as well have lexical fun while the world burns.