101 YEARS OLD AND STILL FINDS OLD WORDS FOR NEW...

WHEN the good folk at Oxford Dictionaries announced the word of 2017 to be ‘youthquake’, I must say that I thought it rather wifty of them (see below for the meaning of ‘wifty’).

Admitting that the word ‘youthquake’ dates back to at least 1965, they excused themselves on the grounds that it has suddenly come into fashion. But so have sloths, and nobody, apart from me of course, has suggested that ‘sloths’ should have been picked as the word of the year.

In principle, a Word of the Year should be a neologism, never seen before. To show the OUP people how it should be done, I have therefore compiled, from their own Oxford English Dictionary, lists of words celebrating centenaries, bicentenaries, etcetera (see 1418 below) this year.

1918 saw 372 new words enter the language. These include ‘wifty’ (scatter-brained) and, if one wished to go further in deriding a person’s mental abilities, ‘imbecilic’. It also saw the first occurrences of ‘D-Day’ (I bet you thought that was in 1944), ‘Mickey Finn’ (apparently after a Chicago innkeeper of that name who reputedly drugged his customers), ‘ladies’ (in the sense of a washroom) and ‘bad news’. Interestingly ‘good news’ had made its first appearance in 1542, which means that we had 376 years of good news before any bad news came along.

1818 brought a remarkable 640 new entries to the dictionary. Those that have established themselves include ‘ginger ale’, ‘criss-cross’ and ‘daddylong-legs’ (which replaced the earlier ‘father-long-legs’). It also saw the first appearance in English of ‘skyr’ (the unsurpassed Icelandic yogurt) and ‘unsurpassed’. Words of 1818 that have faded but in my opinion deserve to be brought back include ‘guddle’ (to catch fish with one’s hands) and ‘nice-gabbit’ (fussy about food).

1718 gave us 152 new words, including ‘baboonish’, ‘witch-doctor’, ‘negligée’ and ‘greengage’ (named after Sir William Gage, incidentally). I can scarcely believe, however, that we have allowed ‘clour’ (to raise a lump on the head with a heavy blow), ‘snool’ (a mean-spirited person) and ‘yamph’ (to bark or yelp like a dog) to fade from common usage.

1618 was a busy verbal year, bringing another 345 words, but many of those were as ordinary as ‘balcony’, ‘toreador’ or ‘merrymaking’. Of the words that deserve revival, I would suggest ‘nayless’ (accepting no refusal) and ‘sciscitation’ (the act of questioning). In fact, I believe that suggestion should, without sciscitation, be nayless.

1518 must have been a humorous year, for among its 114 neologisms, it gave us ‘giggling’ and ‘laughing stock’.

1418 produced only 32 dictionary entries, including ‘bulwark’, ‘wild cat’ and ‘etcetera’. Perhaps the dictionary compilers that year just entered a few words, then wrote ‘etcetera’.

1318 (seven entries) was the year of ‘parish priest’, and 1218 saw ‘pinder’ (a person in charge of rounding up stray animals). He can’t have been very effective, or ‘wild cat’ would not have emerged 200 years later.