The Guardian: A Glossary for the Nineties
You talking to me? Are you on-message? Do you even understand the phrase? English is changing fast. David Rowan provides a user-friendly update on the latest additions to the language
Ten years ago, you would have spilt your lager if someone in a pub had asked whether you were a sinbad or a sitcom. In 1998, you will know this is a simple enquiry as to your marital status: whether you have a Single Income, No Boyfriend, and are Absolutely Desperate or a Single Income, Two Children and an Oppressive Mortgage.
Had it been suggested a couple of years ago that you reply by bookmarking this suitor for a future date, or responding sharply that you would not consider down- dating, you might have professed ignorance. Nowadays know that you are facing a choice between taking a phone number and rejecting your admirer as inadequate. Language is permanently updating itself, and in the 1990s faster than ever. And, whether we're adultescents (steeped in youth culture when we're old enough to know better) or trustafarians (living off trust funds in west London), we ignore new words under peril of losing touch.
The English that keeps forcing dictionaries to update steals its new words from the slang of sub- cultures, the jargon of specialists, the demands of new technology and new social trends - the Blair babes' fear of going off-message, or the bobbitting of an American whose wife cut him off in his prime.
Many of the new terms serve only to hide what people want to say - from the euphemisms of business chiefs to the jargon of experts who want to keep you in the dark. But many add colour, humour and richness to life or meet a new need in a user-friendly way (like the term user-friendly, which turns 18 this year).
Whenever a need arises, some part of society invents a word or expression. It might be a change in the job market, which in the past five years has brought about the Dump (the Destitute Unemployed Mature Professional). Or new technology, which has brought alpha geeks to every company's IT department: they're the dull techies who become your heroes when things go wrong.
Subcultures are busy inventing terms to stay ahead of mainstream society. Groups with little economic power - from road protesters to inner-city rap fans - can reclaim their language. Skateboarders talk about bongos and swellbows, so only the initiated know they are referring to injuries.
Sometimes mainstream culture borrows from these smaller groups: take phat and dis, which began as rap slang but now saturate the commercial teen magazines. Professional groups also invent new terms to stay ahead of the rest of us. Doctors might talk about difficult patients as Gomers (short for Get Out Of My Emergency Room), or chat about treating a woman patient with a Tube (a Totally Unnecessary Breast Examination), reinforcing their group identity with terms designed to keep outsiders ignorant.
At other times, the goal is deliberately to mislead. When a supermarket tries to attract shelf-stackers in ads offering an 'ambient replenishment opportunity' as Safeway has been doing, or a company chairman regrets he has to decruit you, the expressions obscure the truth. You can almost sympathise with the Chrysler managers who had to talk down the 5,000 sackings at their Wisconsin plant earlier this decade, which they officially referred to as part of a career alternative enhancement programme.
Some new words emerge simply because they are enjoyable to use. There might be few occasions when you need to refer to chic gay women as lipstick lesbians, but any journalist will alight upon such a colourful term at any opportunity. The same goes for feminazis, the rightwing radio hosts' term for hardline feminists, or the voice-jail that traps you in automated phone systems: invented words delivered in such image-filled packages stand a good chance of survival. But if a new word is not mediagenic (think photogenic and extend it for this media-led age), it will disappear, even if it meets a linguistic need.
There is no shortage of new words. The New Oxford Dictionary of English, launched last month, includes more than 2,000 for the first time, from shock jocks and happy-clappies to slackers and downshifters. Its editor, Judy Pearsall, puts the fecundity of English down to its vastness as a world language.
Spoken by more than 300 million people as a first language, and many more as a second, it also dominates computing and business, pop and medicine. English is all-absorbing, Pearsall says. It hasn't been fettered by a language authority that seeks to keep words out. Certainly English has always stolen: with nothing like the Academie Francaise to keep our utterances correct, it has historically added anything it fancied, from window (Old Icelandic) and schmaltz (Yiddish) to veranda (Hindi) and parliament (Old French).
In the 1990s, the pace appears to be speeding up . Partly this is because life has become faster: as soon as you master the fax, along comes e-mail; you're just coming to terms with the New Lad, when you discover that andropause - the male equivalent of the menopause - has moved from medical journals to dinner parties. With our fast-changing work patterns, our increasing sexual self-classification and our growing advertising and media literacy, hardly a day goes by without a previously unrecorded phrase appearing in one of the broadsheets. And if you don't pick them up first time, don't worry: lexicographers are increasingly devoting resources to monitoring new words. Oxford has a separate department reading everything from Rolling Stone to UnixWorld. Databases make it easier for them to spot new usages, intense competition makes it prudent for them to shout about them. This summer Chambers and Collins also launched new dictionaries in a scramble for the back-to-school market.
But can our neologisms genuinely tell us much about life in the 1990s? Will future historians be able to understand 1998 Britain simply by studying Viagra and political spinmeister? Judy Pearsall notes that trends are emerging. We're eating and buying a much-wider variety of foods, hence all the new vegetables and ingredients - bruschetta to alcopops. Then there's employment, or the lack of it - presenteeism, downshifting or down- siz ing. Things have become less stable in the workplace, as we're all outsourcing. Future social historians will also be able to point to our leisure fashions: home shopping, and new types of sport: basejumping, skysurfing, weightboarding. Then there's alternative medi cine. And lonely-hearts ads: the historians will discover that these were important. In politics, a lot more of the emphasis now is on image, so words have to be controlled more.
A future historian might tell us that our politicians were obsessed with presentation around 1997. We suddenly had to learn about prebuttal, that development of rebuttal and rapid rebuttal, saturating reporters with facts before something had occurred; we learnt that folletting (after Barbara) meant rethinking the presentation of an outdated object, such as a Labour MP, to give it wider appeal; and we discovered the importance of staying on-message.
We will still be seen to be keen to classify ourselves (or at least, the marketing people will be): it might not be as rigidly as those 1980s fixtures the yuppies, lombards and dinkies, but more broadly now as those in the sandwich generation (caught between bringing up children and caring for older relatives), or as terminally bored slackers. And in sex and relationships, there will have been hasbians who used to be lesbians, to the manists who seek to stand up to feminists.
We will also be seen to have had a sense of humour, from the lunch box that defines the male genitals, to the rumpty that the tabloids decided had to replace those older terms nookie, rumpy pumpy and steamy sex sessions.
Not all of these terms will last. The language is always moving on, as people vote with their tongues, and new words are often the first to be left behind. David Barnhart's Neo-Words, a 1991 collection, already looks dated: that 1985 term blipvert, an ad compressed to a few seconds, died quickly, as did wogging, jogging interspersed with periods of walking; but where would we be without HIV (1986, spotted in Scientific American)? The 1990 Longman Register of New Words was right about lager-lout and eco-friendly; but popstrel, a young female pop singer? Or yummies, meaning Muslim yuppies? Some coinages, already, have become so indispensablethat it is hard to imagine how we coped without them: was there really life before the telemarketers kept ringing us at home and newspapers worried about dumbing down? What did we call ecowarriors or policy wonks before we had the words for them?
We can only guess where the language will take us next. We know for sure that Viagra, a word nobody had heard last year, will come to define one 1998 obsession. Beyond that, it's up to you and me.
A Glossary for the 90s, by David Rowan, is published by Prion at £6.99
(The Guardian, September 12 1998)
Ten years ago, you would have spilt your lager if someone in a pub had asked whether you were a sinbad or a sitcom. In 1998, you will know this is a simple enquiry as to your marital status: whether you have a Single Income, No Boyfriend, and are Absolutely Desperate or a Single Income, Two Children and an Oppressive Mortgage.
Had it been suggested a couple of years ago that you reply by bookmarking this suitor for a future date, or responding sharply that you would not consider down- dating, you might have professed ignorance. Nowadays know that you are facing a choice between taking a phone number and rejecting your admirer as inadequate. Language is permanently updating itself, and in the 1990s faster than ever. And, whether we're adultescents (steeped in youth culture when we're old enough to know better) or trustafarians (living off trust funds in west London), we ignore new words under peril of losing touch.
The English that keeps forcing dictionaries to update steals its new words from the slang of sub- cultures, the jargon of specialists, the demands of new technology and new social trends - the Blair babes' fear of going off-message, or the bobbitting of an American whose wife cut him off in his prime.
Many of the new terms serve only to hide what people want to say - from the euphemisms of business chiefs to the jargon of experts who want to keep you in the dark. But many add colour, humour and richness to life or meet a new need in a user-friendly way (like the term user-friendly, which turns 18 this year).
Whenever a need arises, some part of society invents a word or expression. It might be a change in the job market, which in the past five years has brought about the Dump (the Destitute Unemployed Mature Professional). Or new technology, which has brought alpha geeks to every company's IT department: they're the dull techies who become your heroes when things go wrong.
Subcultures are busy inventing terms to stay ahead of mainstream society. Groups with little economic power - from road protesters to inner-city rap fans - can reclaim their language. Skateboarders talk about bongos and swellbows, so only the initiated know they are referring to injuries.
Sometimes mainstream culture borrows from these smaller groups: take phat and dis, which began as rap slang but now saturate the commercial teen magazines. Professional groups also invent new terms to stay ahead of the rest of us. Doctors might talk about difficult patients as Gomers (short for Get Out Of My Emergency Room), or chat about treating a woman patient with a Tube (a Totally Unnecessary Breast Examination), reinforcing their group identity with terms designed to keep outsiders ignorant.
At other times, the goal is deliberately to mislead. When a supermarket tries to attract shelf-stackers in ads offering an 'ambient replenishment opportunity' as Safeway has been doing, or a company chairman regrets he has to decruit you, the expressions obscure the truth. You can almost sympathise with the Chrysler managers who had to talk down the 5,000 sackings at their Wisconsin plant earlier this decade, which they officially referred to as part of a career alternative enhancement programme.
Some new words emerge simply because they are enjoyable to use. There might be few occasions when you need to refer to chic gay women as lipstick lesbians, but any journalist will alight upon such a colourful term at any opportunity. The same goes for feminazis, the rightwing radio hosts' term for hardline feminists, or the voice-jail that traps you in automated phone systems: invented words delivered in such image-filled packages stand a good chance of survival. But if a new word is not mediagenic (think photogenic and extend it for this media-led age), it will disappear, even if it meets a linguistic need.
There is no shortage of new words. The New Oxford Dictionary of English, launched last month, includes more than 2,000 for the first time, from shock jocks and happy-clappies to slackers and downshifters. Its editor, Judy Pearsall, puts the fecundity of English down to its vastness as a world language.
Spoken by more than 300 million people as a first language, and many more as a second, it also dominates computing and business, pop and medicine. English is all-absorbing, Pearsall says. It hasn't been fettered by a language authority that seeks to keep words out. Certainly English has always stolen: with nothing like the Academie Francaise to keep our utterances correct, it has historically added anything it fancied, from window (Old Icelandic) and schmaltz (Yiddish) to veranda (Hindi) and parliament (Old French).
In the 1990s, the pace appears to be speeding up . Partly this is because life has become faster: as soon as you master the fax, along comes e-mail; you're just coming to terms with the New Lad, when you discover that andropause - the male equivalent of the menopause - has moved from medical journals to dinner parties. With our fast-changing work patterns, our increasing sexual self-classification and our growing advertising and media literacy, hardly a day goes by without a previously unrecorded phrase appearing in one of the broadsheets. And if you don't pick them up first time, don't worry: lexicographers are increasingly devoting resources to monitoring new words. Oxford has a separate department reading everything from Rolling Stone to UnixWorld. Databases make it easier for them to spot new usages, intense competition makes it prudent for them to shout about them. This summer Chambers and Collins also launched new dictionaries in a scramble for the back-to-school market.
But can our neologisms genuinely tell us much about life in the 1990s? Will future historians be able to understand 1998 Britain simply by studying Viagra and political spinmeister? Judy Pearsall notes that trends are emerging. We're eating and buying a much-wider variety of foods, hence all the new vegetables and ingredients - bruschetta to alcopops. Then there's employment, or the lack of it - presenteeism, downshifting or down- siz ing. Things have become less stable in the workplace, as we're all outsourcing. Future social historians will also be able to point to our leisure fashions: home shopping, and new types of sport: basejumping, skysurfing, weightboarding. Then there's alternative medi cine. And lonely-hearts ads: the historians will discover that these were important. In politics, a lot more of the emphasis now is on image, so words have to be controlled more.
A future historian might tell us that our politicians were obsessed with presentation around 1997. We suddenly had to learn about prebuttal, that development of rebuttal and rapid rebuttal, saturating reporters with facts before something had occurred; we learnt that folletting (after Barbara) meant rethinking the presentation of an outdated object, such as a Labour MP, to give it wider appeal; and we discovered the importance of staying on-message.
We will still be seen to be keen to classify ourselves (or at least, the marketing people will be): it might not be as rigidly as those 1980s fixtures the yuppies, lombards and dinkies, but more broadly now as those in the sandwich generation (caught between bringing up children and caring for older relatives), or as terminally bored slackers. And in sex and relationships, there will have been hasbians who used to be lesbians, to the manists who seek to stand up to feminists.
We will also be seen to have had a sense of humour, from the lunch box that defines the male genitals, to the rumpty that the tabloids decided had to replace those older terms nookie, rumpy pumpy and steamy sex sessions.
Not all of these terms will last. The language is always moving on, as people vote with their tongues, and new words are often the first to be left behind. David Barnhart's Neo-Words, a 1991 collection, already looks dated: that 1985 term blipvert, an ad compressed to a few seconds, died quickly, as did wogging, jogging interspersed with periods of walking; but where would we be without HIV (1986, spotted in Scientific American)? The 1990 Longman Register of New Words was right about lager-lout and eco-friendly; but popstrel, a young female pop singer? Or yummies, meaning Muslim yuppies? Some coinages, already, have become so indispensablethat it is hard to imagine how we coped without them: was there really life before the telemarketers kept ringing us at home and newspapers worried about dumbing down? What did we call ecowarriors or policy wonks before we had the words for them?
We can only guess where the language will take us next. We know for sure that Viagra, a word nobody had heard last year, will come to define one 1998 obsession. Beyond that, it's up to you and me.
A Glossary for the 90s, by David Rowan, is published by Prion at £6.99
(The Guardian, September 12 1998)
posted by David Rowan at Saturday, September 12, 1998
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