New lingo causing English ‘permacrisis’
IN 2022, we’re alarmed at the shrinkflation of our favourite snacks, dreaming about quiet-quitting our jobs and convinced there’s bossware on our laptops. Our pets are splooting, our kids are eshays, and we’re going into goblin mode just to cope.
To make ourselves feel better, we’ll dress in Barbiecore, make fun of cookers, and grab a bachelor’s handbag for dinner on the way home from work.
These terms have all been dubbed words of the year.
In case you’re cheugy (oldfashioned, basic) like me, you might be unaware that shrinkflation is what happens when the packet size – and price – stays the same but the product gets smaller.
Quiet quitting is a personal protest by an employee refusing to work extra hours or duties for their job, and bossware is software installed by our employers to spy on us.
Splooting is what happens when an animal lies down with its back legs flat against the floor. This charming term comes from Britain. Trust the Brits to have a dog’s pose on the top of their new word charts.
The classic sploot is not to be confused with the side sploot or the full sploot, one Brit expert explained. My dog’s doing a reverse sploot right now, waiting for me to stop writing and pat him.
Eshay is a term for teenagers who are anti-social and wear try-hard branded clothing. You know, the kids heckling others at the bus stops outside suburban shopping centres. (They’re probably mine – tell them to go home as their mum’s been trying to call them.)
And cooker, in case you haven’t heard, is a derogatory term for a person involved in protests against vaccine mandates and lockdowns. Being called a Young Liberal is much more insulting, I reckon.
Barbiecore is dressing in a candy pink colour head-to-toe, and goblin mode involves rejecting other people’s expectations in favour of doing whatever the hell you want.
You know, like working from home during Covid.
But my favourite term of the year is bachelor’s handbag, a description for a takeaway chicken in a handy plastic bag favoured by single gents planning an easy dinner.
Kind of like a goon bag, but a bit more classy.
All these fun terms make the Australian National University word of the year – teal – seem quite boring. Although blue and green were never to be seen, the zeal for teal is undeniable.
It’s funny, though, that a decade ago exactly the ANU word of the year was “green-on-blue” relating to attacks in the Afghan war. Still, teal is better than permacrisis, which is the word of the year from the Collins English Dictionary. It’s what happens when a period of instability or series of catastrophic events have people in a continuous state of anxiety.
It’s also what happens when Mavis at the local hair salon leaves the perming cream on too long and burns her clients’ heads.
Sometimes words of the year are determined by the number of times they are searched online. Cambridge Dictionary’s top word for 2022 is homer, which was searched 75,000 times in the first week of May when it was a term used in Wordle. In the US it’s a slang word for a home run, but the word stumped Poms and Aussies, who rushed online to work out what it meant.
The same thing happened with the Wordle word caulk, which annoyed many people. I guess they hadn’t seen those naughty New Zealand deck ads where one guy talks about his giant caulk and the other his big deck. (Say it with a Kiwi accent.)
New words are being invented all the time. Cambridge Dictionary tells me some of its latest additions include milestone anxiety, which is what happens when you reach a major birthday and worry you haven’t kept up with your peers. Brown noise is background noise that’s soothing and puts you to sleep, like your boss talking in meetings. There’s also scream pot, which is a pot you scream into to make you feel better (teenagers call them mothers).
Teens are always at the forefront of new words. According to the ones who live in my house, if someone’s doing a good job they “ate it”, something original is the “OG” and anything ace is “bussin”.
Still, these words are better than the new additions to the Scrabble dictionary, which include grawlix, zoomer, vaquita, folx and ambigram. How ridiculous.
I’ve got a new term.
Word rage. It’s the emotions evoked by the coining of silly words no one will ever need, use or remember.
After all, who can remember past words of the year such as vuvuzela, Kwaussie and Dracula sneeze, let alone use them in sentences?