From woke to gammon: buzzwords by the people who coined them
Are we living through a golden age of linguistic inventiveness? Buzzwords and neologisms – from office jargon to the lexicons of democratic chaos in Britain and the US, as well as the everexpanding culture wars – rain down on us every day, and can gain global currency at the speed of fibre-optic cable. Many, of course, fail – like “Brixit”, an early rival to Brexit, or “Generation Me”, one proposed label for what we now call millennials. Others rapidly become part of the modern conversation. Why, for example, do critics call young, supposedly over sensitive and easily triggered people “snowflakes”? Because in Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club, Tyler Durden says: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”
Palahniuk’s contribution, however, was accidental. He later explained: “Back in 1994, when I was writing my book, I wasn’t insulting anyone but myself… My use of the term ‘snowflake’ never had anything to do with fragility or sensitivity.” Instead, he was using it as a means of “deprogramming himself”, so he didn’t believe in his own praise. But the point is that you can’t control what usage will do once it’s out of your hands: a much wider uptake can shift the meaning. The term “woke”, for example, is now used mockingly for a kind of overrighteous liberalism; but its first recorded use, by the African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley, was meant to indicate an awareness of political issues, especially those around race, a positive usage that still also persists.
Some people coin words for the sheer fun of it – and if the rhythm and pleasure of the sound are sufficient, they might be lucky enough to see it go viral. This is how we got “fashionista” – coined by Stephen Freid in a 1993 biography of the supermodel Gia – and “amazeballs”, first used publicly by the fashion blogger Elizabeth Spiridakis Olson in 2008. It’s easy to forget that every word in the English language has had a first use; a language is the record of innumerable creative decisions. Most of those responsible are lost to lexicographical history, but in our online age, it is easier to identify the culprit or heroine.
I tracked some of them down. What is it like to see a word you invented get into the dictionary? And how does it feel if it spirals out of control, in ways you never intended?
Brexit
The word Brexit was a tragically unintentional success in verbal invention: coined as a warning, it became a rallying call. In early 2012, the possibility that crisis-stricken Greece might have to leave the Eurozone was labelled “Grexit”, for Greek exit. Then Peter Wilding, a former adviser to David Cameron, left his job as European director of BSkyB in order to set up a thinktank called British Influence, which was designed to celebrate and encourage Britain’s role as a leader in the EU. On 15 May 2012, he published an article on a European blog platform, in which he argued that if Britain’s leaders did not set out a positive vision for membership, “then the portmanteau for Greek euro exit might be followed by another sad word, Brexit.”
Between 2005 and 2008, Wilding had worked in Brussels as media and policy director of the Conservative party in Europe. “I found,” he recalls now, “Britain was running the show. It had all the most powerful portfolios in the European commission. The penny dropped for me: here was Britain as the leading power.”
In 2016, Wilding went to see Cameron in Downing Street, brandishing the results of a poll that showed the majority of Britons wanted the country to lead in Europe. “I said to him, ‘You could be the new Churchill here: you could say Britain is a leader in Europe and we’ve achieved all these things.’ He said, ‘No, we just don’t have enough time to roll out this message. We won the Scottish referendum and the general election through fear and the economy, and we’ll win this one the same way.’ I said, ‘You will lose.’”
And lose they did. Was part of the problem the sheer energy and brio of the word Brexit itself? In 2012, alternatives had been flying around: both the Economist and the Daily Mail referred to a possible “Brixit”, while others suggested UKExit; but Brexit was clearly the most satisfying to pronounce. Wilding says it came to indicate “a stamp of rage: exit, leave, we’ve had enough of it”.
Remain is “not a sexy word”, he points out; it is partly a result of the successful lobbying by anti-Europe conservatives to avoid having a referendum question that invited the positive answer “Yes” as to whether Britain should stay in the EU. Brexit is now in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined as “The (proposed) withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, and the political process associated with it.”
When it was named Word of the Year in 2016 by Collins dictionaries, Wilding says, “It was a surprise. It had only recently gone crazy in public discourse. I felt shocked that that would be my footnote in the Brexit saga.” And now? The word Brexit, he thinks, “could