New Words and Phrases for 2014

The Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary update their additions once a year. Their web pages will list more words that are not added formally to their printed editions.

Both the printed and the web pages are interesting for their choices. I am not a purist when it comes to languages. I use many slang terms. I also appreciate that the English languages, both American and British, change quickly mainly due to the internet and the number of people who use English to communicate either in a chat room or while conducting business. What I do not understand is how some of these words and phrases make it into a hard bound copy of a dictionary. Some seem like slang and a fleeting fantasy while others make sense and will stay in use in a quarter of century. I starred the words I think will disappear in a decade or less. What do you think?

CATFISH: 1. any of an order of chiefly freshwater stout-bodied scaleless bony fishes having long tactile barbels; *2. a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes

*CROWDFUNDING:  the practice of soliciting financial contributions from a large number of people especially from the online community

FRACKING: the injection of fluid into shale beds at high pressure in order to free up petroleum resources (such as oil or natural gas)

*FREEGAN: an activist who scavenges for free food (as in waste receptacles at stores and restaurants) as a means of reducing consumption of resources

*GAMIFICATION: the process of adding games or gamelike elements to something (as a task) so as to encourage participation

HASHTAG: a word or phrase preceded by the symbol # that classifies or categorizes the accompanying text (such as a tweet)

PHO: a soup made of beef or chicken broth and rice noodles

POUTINE: chiefly Canada; a dish of French fries covered with brown gravy and cheese curds

*TURDUCKEN: a boneless chicken stuffed into a boneless duck stuffed into a boneless turkey

SMH: shaking my head negatively

*AMAZEBALLS: extremely good or impressive; amazing

*DOX or DOXX: publishing private or identifying information about a specific individual with  malicious intent

ACQUIHIRE: buying a company for the value of its staff and not for the product or service itself

CLICKBACK: content on the internet that draws attention to and thus visitors to a specific web page

*VAX: vaccination

*HUMBLEBRAG: ostensibly modest, self deprecating comment to draw attention one’s self or accomplishments

*HENCH: man who is physically fit

*ADORBS: cute, adorabable

*MANSPLAIN: man, usually, explaining to a woman, usually, something using a condescending manner

*LISTICLE: article on the internet that uses bullet point or numbers for emphasis or clarity

www.merriam-webster.com 

www.oxfordenglishdictionary.com 

Neologisms (new words and phrases) 2014

Thomas Jefferson on Neologisms  “But if dictionaries are to be the arbiters of language, in which of them shall we find neologism? No matter. It is a good word, well sounding, obvious, and expresses an idea, which would otherwise require circumlocution. I am a friend to neology. It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony.” (Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820)

To a writer, the use of neologisms is a conscious decision. You ask yourself, “Does this fit my character, the times, and does it express what I want my character to say to move forward the plot?” “The cat’s meow” does not belong in Slaughterhouse Five nor does “poshitis” make sense in Jane Eyre. Here is a list of some current neologisms. Some will become an integral part of the American English language and others will fade like cheap lipstick. urbandictionary.com is an excellent resource for neologisms.

DIGITAL DETOX—period when a person, in order to decrease stress, stops using electronic devices

DIGITAL AFTERLIFE---what remains of a person online after their death

PLANET HACKING—geo-engineering methods intended to mitigate climate change

MULTIGEN—groups includes people of several different ages

CULTURED LEATHER—leather grown from skin cells

POSHITIS—back pain from carrying in the crook of your arm an oversized handbag

WIKICELL—type of edible food packaging

ZENWARE—internet technology designed to make users calmer

CRONUT—cross between a doughnut and a croissant

MEM—image or piece of ext that helps you remember something

MEH—uninteresting especially conversation on-line

FRANKENSHOES---really ugly shoes

FLATFORMS—flat shoe with a high, thick sole

HOBOSEXUAL—sexually active person who hops from one partner to another

BROMANCE—strong, nonsexual friendship between two or more men

ALCOLOCK—device on a car that locks the engine when a driver has consumed too much alcohol

DWEETS—drunken Tweets

PHUBBING—snubbing someone in a social situation

TWERK(ING)--dance in a highly sexual, provocative way

LISTICLE—a magazine article written like a list

PINKWASHING—practice of using the color pink to indicate a company has joined the search for a cure for breast cancer (from Susan B. Komen Foundation)

CUPERTINO EFFECT—computer automatically types what it thinks you meant to say; ‘fraud’ instead of ‘Freud’

SLACKVISION—practice of clicking multiple on-line petitions for political reasons

SELFIE—picture you take of yourself to post on a social media site

EX—former; he exed his girlfriend last night

IFNIK—person who lives, works and plays conditionally. He gives several reasons he will or will not join “if….”

VIDEOCRACY—power of visual images in contemporary societies that have a crucial impact on the consumer-- “I want that!”

ALPHA CONSUMER—person who picks up trends early and who has to have the newest, hottest item; influenced by videocracy

WEBBIAGE—too much information on a web site

BEAULICIOUS—something that appeals to the two senses of vision and taste; a beaulocious cupcake for instance

BOFRO—shortened form of boyfriend

SSB—sugar-sweetened beverage

PRANCERCISE—form of exercise that imitates a horse prancing

FLOOROBE—pile of clothes discarded on the floor during a busy day

FACE BOOK-HAPPY—miserable person who fakes bliss in carefully managed Face book posts

BRAPHET—person who thinks he knows everything

PEACOCKING—similar to braphet in that a person gives off an intentional, superior image to others via expensive clothes, cars, electronic equipment, houses, boats

OBAMACARE—political term for managed health care in America

BIT COIN—decentralized, open-source, peer-to-peer currency

BINGE-WATCHING—marathon viewing of a TV series from its DVD set

SMH---shaking my head

SNOWHAWK—line of snow you are unable to reach when you brush off snow accumulation on your car; auto Mohawk

FISHELED—wrong weather forecast; snow storm predicted for overnight but you wake up to no snow for instance

DISNEY EFFECT—to make a bad prequel or sequel to a blockbuster movie

•               Old Neologisms
"O harsh lips! I now hear all around me such words as common, vices, entry, malice; even virtue, study, justice, pity, mercy, compassion, profit, commodity, colour, grace, favor, acceptance. But whither, pray, in all the world have you banished those words which our forefathers used for these new-fangled ones? Are our words to be exiled like our citizens? Is the new barbaric invasion to extirpate the English tongue?"
(Alexander Gill, Logonomia Anglica, 1619; quoted by Henry Barnard in English Pedagogy, 1862)

NEOLOGISMS 2012

It is time to review the newly coined words, neologisms, from 2012. People make up new words out of necessity, because no other word describes the situation, for comic relief, or to shorten a long phrase or name. The Washington Post  sponsors an annual contest and lists the top ten entrants which are mostly funny words, "coughee--one who gets coughed upon" for example.  People spend enormous amounts of time thinking up new words most of which never catch the imagination of others. But, because of the desire to be accepteced socially especially on the Internet by using neologisms and when the words are so clever, neologisms become well known and used by a variety of people over a wide geographic area.

The American Dialectic Society has devised a scale to judge the potential of long lasting success of a new word called the FUDGE scale:
Frequency of use
Unobstrusivenss --is it to "cutesy"
Diversity of users and situations
Generation of other forms word may take like a noun and a verb
Endurance of concept

Here are some examples of neologisms made popular in 2012. It is by no means inclusive.

blognescenti---bloggers who write with class
jigsaw family---a family blend of of children from two or more sets of parents
pentrepreneur---an entrepreneur of pensionable age
autograt---a tip automatically added to your restaurant bill, hotel or bar bill
ego surfer--someone who searches the World Wide Web for his names using Google or some other search engine. (Hmm.)
404--someone who is hopeless; from World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found" meaning the web site you are searching for was not found
fidocam---camera on the head of a police dog
Frankenstorm---devastation brought by storm Sandy (not likely to endure)
pay-neutral---describes a paycheck that only covers expenses after  child-care costs, travel , etc. costs have been deducted
metrosexual--someone who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance
the precariat--new class of people consisting of debt-ridden, educated people looking for jobs but many are not finding jobs so they settle for casual or part-time work
bankster---a banker whose actions are illegal
geobragging---repeated status updates noting your location in order to get attention or to make others jealous
zero-hours---employee contract where an employee has no guarantee of work but who must be available to work and is paid only for hours worked
chilax---being told to calm down, relax when you are getting uptight
Republican'ts---49% of Republicans in a recent survey who did not know what what their "GOP" symbol stood for "Grand Old Party" (not likely to endure)
moon-basing---political candidate's offhanded comment or proposed policy that is so outrageous that it hurts his campaign. EX: "legal rape"
prenopsis---summary of a book movie, TV show or event formed purely on expectation, bias and hope formulated before the object or event has occurred.
tweet cred--social standing on Twitter. Justin Bieber has the most tweet cred

meh---from the writers of "The Simpsons", a shrug of indifference

@---to write a message to or about someone on Twitter
Twisticuffs---an argument conducted on Twitter (Demi Moore and Kim Kardashain, Katy Perry vs. Lady Gaga and Perez Hilton vs almost everybody)
#bashtag---Twitter  account companies created to promote themselves but are then used by others to publicly criticize the company. In a January 25, 2012 article by Jamie Griswold on MYNorthwest.com, Ms Griswold wrote

"A McDonald's social media marketing campaign has gone viral, but not exactly in the way they wanted.

'They decided to start a twitter hashtag, which is a way of organizing tweets about the same subject on twitter, about these great stories about McDonald's,' said 97.3 KIRO FM host Luke Burbank, in a discussion of the campaign on The Ross and Burbank Show. The LA Times reports McDonald's stopped promoting the campaign two hours after launching it. But as twitter users observed, it's hard to kill a twitter trend. 
The failed hashtag even spawned a new twitter term #bashtag.

"So instead of a hashtag, it's a bashtag. That's when you either start a hashtag just to sort of decry something or you take over someone's hashtag and make it into a negative, that is a bashtag," explains Burbank.

Many twitter users conclude "#McDStories was a #McFail."

symblomatic---coined by Donald Trump and is a combination of symbolic, emblematic and symptomatic
webinar---seminar on the internet or the Web as in a MOOC (massive online open courses)
brain candy---non-intellectual form of entertainment
truthiness---coined by Sephen Colbert to describe a quality characterizing a "truth" that is known intuitively, a gut feeling, without regard to logic, facts, intellectual study or fact supported                                      STEPHEN COLBERT

Tebowing---prayerful stance derived from use by NFL quarterback Tim Tebow after a touchdown