Probably the official OED wordoftheyear will be ‘lockdown’ or some such much-worked close assembly of letters.
But do you have a favourite or favourites?
I got to thinking about this after reading the Brian Eno article in GQ. He lists nearly 400 new words, though not necessarily all from this year. I’ll post the nearly 50 that were new to me in the comments below.
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/preview/articles/5faaa9a0ab4311e33c32f69f?status=draft&t=1605028609053
These were the words that were new to me. I haven’t looked them all up, but those I have are fascinating or at least revealing about modem life.
anti-natalism
ASMR
black hat
boogaloo
Chaturbate
cli-fi
daisy-cutter
DMT (drug)
dox
doomscrolling
enhanced interrogation
factoid
fat finger
fat studies
flash crash
football mum
ghost (as a verb)
goji berries
Great Awakening
ground-source heating
hooking up
ifpology
‘jump on a call’
location services
Melissa worm, the
MERS
nose to tail
peng
pocket call
post-Internet
preprint
quarantini
queen bee
Shazam
shrooms
spear phishing
stan
starchitect
Stuxnet
targeted killing
teardown culture
Three Percenters, the
tripcode
truthiness
vulture capitalism
WeChat
zoonotic
My Dad had a great Dad moment in about 1985 when looking at the cinema listings in the local paper.
“Breakdance 2 is Electric Boogaloo!??“
We’re going to lockdown 2 – electric boogaloo
Every “2” is now followed in our household by the term “electric boogaloo.” Although not necessarily every number two, I should point out.
What I found most interesting was not the words that were completely unknown, nor the ones I was already familiar with, but those just familiar enough note to go on the short list and those just unfamiliar enough to go on. “I know that word, though I haven’t used it much myself” vs. “I think I’ve heard that word before, but I’ll just check the meaning before putting it in my linguistic toolkit”
Words mulch into our conscious and unconscious vocabulary like composting leaf matter – the year’s new growth feeding the soil culture.
Nose to tail as in eating rather than traffic I assume. My favourite words of 2020 are all obscenities.
The Pig, the whole pig, and nothing but the pig, apparently.
I haven’t researched many of the words on my shorter Eno list, but it’s a whole world of linguistic pleasure, unboxing each one as I go. I’m just relieved this wasn’t a reference to The Human Centipede.
I thought the Human Centipede was something along the lines of the Very Hungry Caterpillar. I think It was an understandable mistake to make – but the fact is that the children’s friends don’t come to our house any more.
Arf!
Thanks to the person on here who introduced me to the charming chesticles.
Less welcome was boosterism. Amirite?
Which charming chesticles? Full URL please. I am not at work.
Steve Wright “in the afternoon” has been using “factoid” for years. I’m not sure when it first appeared, but certainly before 2020.
The OP does mention that they are not necessarily all from 2020. Anyway I heard “factoid” on white label years before Steve Wright used it.
Factoid has been around for years. Perhaps millions of years. Some palaeontologists date it to the middle Mesozoic. Before there were facts there were factoids, fact fragments that inhabited a soup of incipient certainty.
Millions of years, eah? Like the rest of Wrighty’s joke in that respect.
Soup of Incipient Certainty… Deffo a VDGG outtake.
“Soup of Millions of Years” was in fact the first draft…
…and, for completeness…
There seem to be two definitions of factoid, one of which, the later one, appears to be the “Love the show” Steve version.
I think this ambiguity of definition must have filtered out to me, which is why I kept it on the list – to probe later for clarity. Ironically, its very fuzziness of meaning has a pleasing self-referential quality about it, but I will avoid using it for that very reason.
Factoid, no ‘d’.
Factoi?
(The Gary Bushell-Tony Wilson record label that might have been)
Good list salwarpe. I shall spend a happy hour using my OED login (free to join if you have a library card, word fans) to check out the new-to-me ones.
Not a new word but my favourite word of 2020 will be Vaccine.
Mesozoic.
So so very zoic.
I first came across this coining during the first lockdown.
Snaccident : inadvertently eating a whole packet of Hobnobs in one sitting.
Love that! Could be my favourite. I used to be a Snaccidental Tourist in the land of the plain chocolate Hobnob, but you can’t get them over here much, and the ingredients have been ruined by the use of palm oil. That’s probably a good thing, though I used to try to convince myself plain chocolate and oats were somehow healthy. Certainly a super food, if not a ‘Superfood’.
Perineum
Phloem bundles
“Porridge wog”
What HAVE you got under your kilt, HP?
Nothing is worn…
Beautifully put. Fresh as the day he was born
Ooh, stop!
I’d often wondered what ‘ kitty corner’ meant in Neil Young’s Pocahontas and through the magic of the internet found that it meant diagonally.
Discussing this yesterday, as you do, I was introduced to a different word for diagonally and I promised I would use it in conversation so my latest word is caddywhompus.
Sounds a bit like unrequited love on the golf course.
Since you mentioned golf course….daisy cutter is a golf shot. One that never gets more than a couple of inches off the ground, but still goes a good distance. Also known as a Sally Gunnell in the old days(ladz banter).
Daisy cutter is also a sh*t bowl in cricket that trickles towards the batsman, or a scuffed penalty in soccerball
It’s a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but I think daisy cutter can only refer to a ball that is travelling low and at speed. Without the speed it wouldn’t ‘cut’. Trevor Chappell’s infamous underarm delivery, for instance, would therefore not qualify as a daisy cutter. Or am I wrong?
We had a daisy cutter specialist at school, a lad who enjoyed his food, shall we say. His run-up was a two-step waddle, and then he unleashed a terrifying ball that would hiss and fizz as it came at you and invariably went right under the bat. He wasn’t much use in the other departments, mind you.
Thanks, both! I was wondering what a reference to fragmentation bombs was doing on the list. I’m nor sure that ball games are particularly more 2020, though.
I’ve only ever heard daisy cutter used in reference to military explosives (the image conjured is probably what you would expect). But, obviously, I’m not a golfer.
Most arms deals are done on the golf course. There’s your crossover.
In a “Meaning of Liff” style job, I proposed this one slightly earlier this year.
Rotherfield Peppard (n)
Someone who spends more time moving things to make sure that his video call background wall is as interesting as possible (i.e. floor to ceiling reference books, African wall sculptures, abstract art etc) than he does on the call itself. (Especially if said background wall is normally covered in mould stains, pictures his kids did 4 years ago and muddy dog pawprints).
I spent a lot of time obscuring wine racks. True.
Didn’t he play bass in a low achieving 70s Prog Rock Band?
This being Eno he probably defines “new” as in “the last hundred years” (the list first appeared a while ago in the second edition of his diaries book…). I mean, if you read comic books or listen to Captain Beefheart the words “shazam” or “boogaloo” are hardly top news.
My proposition would be to get someone like They Might Be Giants or Stephin Merritt to write a song about each word on the list. (But please don’t ask Kate Bush.)
As Emo is a founder member member of the Long Now Foundation, which sees the present as lasting from pre-Norman Britain to post-Busted 4th millenium, I wouldn’t be surprised.
However, boogaloo in its modern form seems to be used by the armed alt right in the US (as does Three-percenters). Meaning something like a coming civil war. An old word repurposed, I guess.
There are plenty of names, like stan, that have fallen out of use. Anyne seen an Edith resently?
One of the surprises of living in Paris for me was the conservatism of the names. You can regularly meet young women there called Marlene and Gladys.
Oh Stan, Stan, you know where I am.
I like the name Stan and there have been some good ones: Baxter, Baker, Laurel, Getz, Turrentine, Bowles, Collymore, Matthews, Mortensen and Kubrick, with Unwin in goal.
You stan Stans?
I am learning so much on this thread.
Portmanteau of stalker and fan, apparently – from the Eminem song.
I know a guy whose grandchildren are Stanley, Iris and something else old fashioned which escapes me.
Next door but two have a toddler called Stanley, and two older girls, one of whom is called Mabel.
On the maternal side of my family there was a legendary battleaxe character called Auntie Effie. I recently asked the family genealogist (OK, my second cousin) what her full name was. Euphemia – you don’t get many of them to the pound.
In the 70s in Glasgow my last primary school teacher was called Effie.
You were on first-name terms with your primary school teacher? How progressive!
Maybe a nickname because she swore like a trooper?
Stranglewank – as in the sense of a combination of Omnishambles & Clusterfuck – best exemplified by the cretinous attempts of the government to ‘manage’ the CV-19 pandemic & negotiate the Brexit transition.
What made me smile was the person who tweeted that he’d been using it in the above context with friends, but then discovered his phone’s predictive text had popped it into work texts when he expressed empathy with those feeling the strain in these ‘strange times’.
Oh dear, Jim! Stranglewank doesn’t mean anything close to omnishambles or clusterfuck, I’m sorry to break it to you and your friend. It means autoerotic strangulation while masturbating. Cracking off a Hutchence, if you will.
It was a Tory MP (Stephen Milligan) who did the orange and wardrobe trick before Hutchence lived up to his band’s name. So, quite pleasingly circular if they’ve reclaimed the word for their own cock-ups.
I think that’s *exactly* the sense in which it was intended as appropriate for 2020 – not literally an allusion to orange segments & Amyl but as a means of that word summing up what Johnson, Cummings & co are/were doing – bizarrely self indulgent (some would say disgusting) & with potentially lethal consequences.
Works pretty well, I think.
The ‘Milligan Manoeuvre’ as someone called it.
“Whatarewegonnadonow?”
“Whatarewegonnadonow?”
“Whatarewegonnadonow?”
Working for the clampdown
HA getalong getalong
Cananga odorata
‘You’re my wife now, Dave’.
Nothing to do with walking on the beaches looking at the peaches then?
Ground source heating sounds like geothermal heating, where you pump water down tubes into the earth to a depth where the ambient temperature is slightly higher. When the warmed water returns to the surface, a heat exchanger is used to extract the heat, which is utilised in central or underfloor heating systems. A friend in Switzerland has one in his house, and it’s something I’ve thought about, but the technology remains quite expensive for domestic use, and probably has certain geological requirements.
We had it when we lived in Switzerland. It’s quite pleasant, though slightly strange to walk in bare feet over warm tiles.
Ambient temperature – that’s why Eno is all over it.
This, we are amusing!
Daisy-cutter is either a cricket ball which keeps very low when it bounces, or was bowled deliberately under arm, or a type of aerial bomb whose blast-effect is to scythe everything living or dead off at ground level. The US used daisy cutters in Vietnam to create circular landing zones. The bombs were so large, that they were either dropped from under a CH-54 Skycrane helicopter, or out of the back of a C-130 Hercules.
Is there any reason why it would be a word popular in modern parlance?
Or something you use to make biscuits, according to SWMBO
Oh, right! A cookie-cutter, biscuit-cutter, scone-cutter.
Attach the stone of TRIUMPH!
I always enjoy it when a word I know well takes on a new, unique, rather specific meaning.
Whenever I hear the word “fragrant”, I think of Mary Archer, the wife of the Tory novelist and former jailbird. In the perjury court case, the judge used it to describe her. True, I do also think of some of my AW colleagues and their potent aftershaves
And then there is “over ready” . Previously, I associated it Willy’s or Waitrose.
Now it is synonymous with the mendacious hyperbole of the Blonde Bombshell-
‘Over ready’? I’m not sure that’s accurate when describing Johnson. I don’t think he’s ever been over prepared for anything. ‘Ova ready’, maybe, given his uncertain number of children.
Ooops! Sorry Salwarpe!
I’m not sure whether the villain here was my appalling eyesight or an over-vigilant spell-check. Whatever. The word I was thinking of was “oven-ready.”
Dagens Nyheter, one of the big daily papers here in Stockholm, just did a list of new words. One word that surprised me was “boomer.” Baby boomer first appeared in English in 1963. Can the Swedes be so far behind?
No, what has happened is that the word has changed meaning.
From being an objective description of the year of your birth, boomer has become “OK boomer”, a scorning, pejorative comment about older people who do not understand the younger members of society.
None of those here eh?
It’s quite all right, KFD. I was only teasing you. Gen Xers can do that to Boomers, can’t we?
Boogaloo? In 2020? Back off!
That was good.
Hey! You! – electric boogaloo was also in the charts in 1983.
Goodbye.
This is boogaloo, from the rather wonderfully named Willie Colon
Sellotaph:
The flowers taped to a lamp post still in the plastic wrapper in remembrance of someone killed in a traffic accident.