Entertainment For Lively Minds
What are the words of 2011?
Posted by Joe Robert on 8 June 2011 - 1:49pm.
I keep a diary. Nothing fancy - just at the weekend, or whenever I get a spare moment, I write up a few paragraphs in a Word document about what I've been up to, sometimes accompanied by a couple of relevant JPEGs.
Anyway, last year I included what I thought were some words and phrases that were none-more 2010. Not necessarily brand new words to the lexicon, but ones that seemed to be on everyone's lips or constantly in the papers. 'Coalition'. 'Cleggmania/I agree with Nick'. 'iPad'. 'Wagner'.
What are the words and phrases of 2011? 'Super-injunction' is one. What else?
(I was moved to write this post by seeing 'Unexpected item in the bagging area' down below.)
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Planking?
.
I think one of them must have been uttered by
Cheryl Cole I just can't seem to make out what she's saying.....
Simple
She's saying "Ahm lercal hero the turtally lush and radiant Cherl Kerl and a divvent give a shite"
Not for me but.....
The I-Cloud is being mentioned a lot in the media. Can't think of anything worse personally, as I'm a hoarder of records and Cds etc.
Currently
the word that is really hitting the roof on Google Trends is Weiner...but I guess to make a Word of the Year, it can't just be big for a short while, it needs staying power, doesn't it?
Oscar Mayer
I trust we are all familiar with the advertising jingle for these proprietary weiners, and the unattractive variants thereon?
Let us now....
...commit to making "felch" the word of the year. Or "choad".
If the word "choad" isn't used at least twice in Prime Minister's Questions before December, I will consider it a personal failure.
In a previous civil service job
I provided the answer to a PMQ, to be read out in the House.
To do with numbers of Consular staff employed abroad.
One such was total was 69. I was very pleased about that. I had made an MP say '69' out loud in the Commons. Fnarr and indeed Snurk.
I was given a copy of the Hansard with it in.
TOWIE
and superinjunction
Kettle...
...and not what boils yer water
Scrabble
My partner, who obviously understands these things better than me, scored an inordinate number of points at Scrabble by using felching. I had to look it up, and this probably says more about me than about her, was visibly shocked
Gerbils
Felching: I was told about this practice in 1985, before it even had a name I would imagine, while walking around Stanley Park in Vancouver, by the sister of someone in NY who had 'friends' who allegedly engaged in it; represented as at the bottom, as one might say, of the then-just-hitting-the-headlines new disease of AIDS. A strange memory from a beautiful city. I supposed for a long time that it was just a classic urban myth. Still not 100% sure about this.
think you might need to work it out with a pencil...
This is from late 80's(?) and the aforementioned words used here...
Pippa's bum
...
See also
Pippa Middleton's Disembodied Anus
AIOTM! (aiotm!)
AIOTM!
AIOTM!
I'll go with
Eyjafjallajökull,
Trending,
and
Cumberbatch
(my solicitors.)
Towie
confused me so I fired up Google to look it up.
And through some Freudian slip of the keyboard Googled 'Pippa's bum' instead.
Taffin!!!
Not strictly a word but thanks to Adam & Joe.
One word
that is really, really, REALLY irritating me (and it seems to have been adopted extensively by some of the Massive, to my deep chagrin), is 'meme'. Where has it come from? Why has it suddenly become so over-used? I realise it's a term that must have existed for a long time, but it's only recently that it seems to have become the word du jour, mainly used (at a guess) by media types. I'm curious as to why? Whyowhyowhy? There must have been a word with the same meaning used before, so what changed?
I realise that all this is highly irrational, but the word just drives me nuts!
At this point I require a picture of Kid A. Or a bee in a bonnet. :-)
Well
according to my dictionary it's an element of culture or behaviour passed by non-genetic means, like an idea or convention.
It's apparently been around since the seventies, and is modelled on the word gene. It was Richard Dawkins' doing, though another, similar word 'mneme', which Dawkins claims he knew nothing of, had been around since the turn of the twentieth century.
The wikipedia entry expands further. But, like many scientific words with relatively specific meaning, it gets into the mainstream and is adulterated by misuse.
Thank you, kind sir
Very, er, illuminating. And still very annoying, perhaps even more so :-)
Edit: that's the word, not you. No, not The Word, the word. Although the word is used a lot in The Word...Oh, crikey - help!
Meme
It's weird - it's been part of my everyday language for well over a decade. One of the very first weblogs was called Memepool, named after the fact that it gathered together the things people were talking about on the internet together in one place.
Meme
It's weird, it's played no part in my vocabulary for well over a decade. It is extremely unlikely to feature over-much in the next.
Memepool? I know more about Hartlepool
ha
being snippy and bit grumpy about memes is a very popular erm... meme.
Vajazzle
I know it has been around for a few years, but surely with TOWIE being award-winning and the programme we all watch (well not us, but them, obviously. We've never seen it*)this is surely the year that the vajazzle - or knowing what it is at least - went mainstream.
*actually, that is true. I have never seen it. I have heard of it, though.
What about Glamping?
Will there be much of that at festivals across the country this year?
Glamping
a bit last year probably
Arab Spring
Perhaps the most unexpected and revolutionary happening of this year.
How about "Cup Cake"
as people insist on calling "buns" these days or may be it's neophyte on scene cousin the "Whoopie pie"?
But
A cupcake is significantly different to a traditional bun or fairy cake (cupcakes are bigger and generally have a generous layer of buttercream icing, whereas buns are shallower and tend more often to be decorated with royal icing), and a whoopie pie is another thing altogether, two cake layers with the icing in between -- not a million miles removed from the idea of a Victoria sponge.
It is important to maintain such distinctions or there would be baked goods anarchy.
Bigsociety...
We'reallinthistogether...
cuts
only
one letter out
scout?
Fuck Eulogy
a remembrance of someone whose life cannot be described without the overall theme of "fuck you."
Coined by John Oliver in response to Osama bin Laden's death on The Bugle podcast.
And I've googled Rick Santorum.