I’m a cisgender, yes I am

Cisgender, hippotherapy and humblebrag are among the 500 recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary.

I HAVE a confession to make. I’m a cisgender woman. I was born this way, so please don’t judge me. I didn’t even know I was cisgender, until I saw a definition of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED). And I only knew that it was in the OED, because it was promoted as one of the 500 words that have recently been added due to popular usage.

Cisgender denotes a person whose sense of personal identity matches their gender at birth. It basically tells others that I’m not transgender. But much more than that, it is a huge step for the transgender community.

Previously mocked by some people, the word has been around since the 1990s. However, it’s only recently that its usage has become more widely accepted.

I think it’s great because it means the transgender community might not feel so alienated. Or at least, not as alienated as when they used to be compared to so- called “normal” people. I mean to say, if I consider myself normal, then people who don’t fit into the same box as me are, by definition, abnormal.

The word normal should, at the very most, be limited to describing a shampoo type. Even then, at some stage in the future, all people with frizzy hair, dandruff, or oily locks will surely rebel.

So if you have normal hair, it might be described in a future edition of OED as “nonfrizdandoil” hair. I think I will copyright the word before a large company with a lot of money decides to incorporate it into their branding strategy. But I digress. If all this talk is making you feel a bit stressed, you might want to indulge in a bit of hippotherapy. When I first saw the word ( hippotherapy is another recent addition to the OED), an image of a person sitting astride a hippopotamus popped into my head. Then I remembered that hippopotamus is a Greek word that literally translated means “river horse”. So, no prizes for guessing what hippotherapy entails.

Another word that caught my eye was humblebrag. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but it actually describes a statement that comes across as self- deprecating, while the person making it is actually boasting about something. For example, you might update your Facebook status with the following: “I’m such a terrible cook it took me ages to figure out how to operate the designer cooker in my new penthouse apartment.”

You could, of course, take it a step further by following up with another post: “I managed to set off the smoke alarm while making toast, so I had to open up the doors to my large wrap- around balcony to let some air in.”

As a personal example, I might say, “I’m always slouching when I’m sitting in front of my computer, so I promised my children I’d try to improve my posture by balancing a book on my head while writing. However, the first time I put my award- winning novel on my head, it immediately slid off and knocked over my coffee cup. I watched helplessly as my favourite brew flooded my congratulatory letter from President Obama. I was so bummed I forgot all about my Skype call with Steven Spielberg to discuss movie rights.’’

I’m not into boasting so I would never actually tell anyone that, or mention that I can type at speeds in excess of 100 words per minute, with my toes, or reveal that I hold the world record for the largest number of grains of rice that can be stuffed up a left nostril at any one time. I’m just way too humble for that sort of blatant bragging.

The OED has also embraced a few initialisms and abbreviations. So I can only SMH ( shake my head) at a song that just happens to contain another word that made it into the OED: cray ( crazy).

Kanye West ( a man who is so blatant with his boastfulness that he can’t even be bothered to use a humblebrag or two in his conversations) and Jay- Z’s hit song N** gas In Paris mentions the word numerous times. I don’t have anything against the word cray, but isn’t the title of the song an offensive racial slur?

I did watch a video of N** gas In Paris on YouTube, but I was only indulging in some “hate- watching”: watching for the sake of the sheer enjoyment I derived from criticizing it.

I know, I know that’s not a nice thing to do. But what the heck, YOLO!