Newest Words and Phrases

nageen · #1 Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Update Your Conversations Using the Newest Words and Phrases.

The English language is permanently evolving and developing. New words and expressions are coined and existing words change their meaning as society, culture and technology progress.

New Words for 2008

Blamestorming: Combination of blaming and brainstorming. Used when co-workers sit around trying to figure out who is at fault for a missed deadline or botched project.
“The client wasn’t happy. You know the boss will want to have a blamestorming session.”

Swipeout: When the magnetic strip on a credit card wears out due to use.
“I just called my credit card company because my old card had a swipeout.”

Friendiligence: The amount of time it takes to maintain friend requests on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.
“I just don’t have time for all of this friendiligence!”

Prehab: A program to prevent young stars from behaving inappropriately.
“Looks like Miley Cyrus is the only one who’s been to prehab.”

Irritainment: A celebrity spectacle that, like a car wreck, you just can’t turn away from.
“Brittney Spears provided enough irritainment for 2007.”

Bromance: Combination of brother and romance used to describe a strong heterosexual relationship between to males.
“Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have a great bromance.”

Earjacking: Eavesdropping on a conversation.
“That guy at that table over there is earjacking us!”

Ginormous: Combination of gigantic and enormous.
“That sandwich I just ate was ginormous.”

New Words for 2009

Fanboy: a superfan of a comic or film genre, as in:
He is a fanboy of all the original Batman comics.

Mondegreen: a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung. In his book, “’Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy,” by (Fireside Publishing, 1995), author Gavin Kalb lists a number of commonly misheard song phrases, such as “Sweet dreams are made of cheese” instead of the accurate “Sweet dreams are made of these”, by the Eurythmics or “I want to rock and roll all night and part of every day,” instead of the real Kiss lyrics: “I want to rock and roll all night and party every day.”

Webinar: an online conference (web+seminar), as in
“I am attending a webinar for freelance copywriters.”

Obviously, some of these words have been around for a while, but have only recently gained the respect of being in the dictionary.

Even Newer Words for 2009

For those on the cutting edge, here are some new phrases from Urbandictionary.com that haven’t yet hit the official book:

Christmas bogus: receiving nothing from an employer at Christmas.
“All I got from my boss was a “Merry Christmas and a Christmas bogus!”

Virtual Friday: the last day of work or school due to an extended weekend.
“With Christmas Eve falling on a Wednesday this year, Tuesday was my virtual Friday.”
:
:

nageen · #2 Friday, January 22, 2010

Explained by Mark Shea

A slip of the thumb

A slip of the thumb is an unintentional mistake made whilst texting, either sending the message to the wrong person or not noticing when predictive texting chooses the wrong word, often to embarrassing or very funny consequences.

If you say something by accident, something you don’t mean to say but perhaps it sounds similar to your intended sentence, we might call this a slip of the tongue. If, for example, you are introducing your current boyfriend or girlfriend, and you use the name of your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, it’s a slip of the tongue. Quite a bad one.

Well, a slip of the thumb is the same, but by text, SMS or perhaps an email sent by a handheld device. You might not notice when your predictive texting selects the wrong word – book instead of cool for example, or nun instead of mum! I have a Spanish friend 'Viki' V-I-K-I, and when I type in her name it comes out ugli, U-G-L-I. A well-known brand of vodka even comes out as poisoned if you’re not careful.

Alternatively, the person who receives your message might not be the person you meant to send it to. This can happen just by pressing the wrong button or the right button once too often.

It’s very easy to do, and a slip of the thumb can land you in real trouble!

Al desko

Where do you eat lunch when you’re at work? Do you go to a canteen? Perhaps out to a restaurant? Maybe you bring a packed lunch or buy a sandwich and go to that lovely park close to the office. You sit outside and enjoy the sunshine – Italians would call this eating 'al fresco', eating out in the fresh air.

Unfortunately, in today’s busy workplace many people don’t think they have time for a leisurely, relaxed lunch. They don’t even think they have time to leave the office. They just bring in a sandwich, and sit at their desk. They’re eating al desko.

It’s particularly common in Britain and America, where people are used to eating their main meal of the day in the evening when they get home from work. Perhaps the bad climate in Britain also has something to do with it – if it’s raining outside, it’s more tempting to eat al desko, to sit in the office and read the news, or perhaps do a bit of shopping or book a holiday. You can always tell which office workers like to eat al desko most – just look for the crumbs in their keyboard!

Angsty

The word angst, meaning neurotic fear, anxiety, guilt or remorse comes from German, but has been used in English since the 1940s. It comes from the same root as the word anger, and was originally popularised in English through translations of the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

The word has more recently adapted however, and now teenagers are much more likely to talk about feeling angsty. When they complain about not being understood by anyone, or that they are alone in the world, they are feeling angsty. When they insist that you could never know how terrible it feels to them, how the whole world wants to destroy them, they do it because they are feeling angsty. An angsty person feels completely unloved, unwanted, disrespected, ignored.

Some cruel people might suggest that those who feel angsty are just looking for attention. But these people don’t understand us. And they never will!

Blackburied

Developments in technology often lead to new vocabulary entering the language. The Blackberry – as I’m sure you know – is a hand-held device which you can use to check your emails as well as to send texts or sms messages and to make telephone calls. Blackberry is a brand name but other companies such as Samsung, Nokia, Hewlett Package make similar products. These devices have become very popular, particularly with commuters – people who have a long journey into work each day. You can see them on the tube in London, typing away on their miniature keyboards with their thumbs.

But these machines have also brought about a new set of problems. Now, you’re only ever a few seconds away from your inbox! What used to be a quiet, relaxed journey into work on the train is now dominated by the latest problems at work. Maybe you used to get to the office at nine o’clock on a Monday, but now your office comes to you as soon as you open up your Blackberry. If you’re feeling like work is coming to dominate your life because you can never get away from your email, you might feel Blackburied! That means you feel inundated and exhausted trying to be on top of all your email twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. You feel buried under all the extra work that the easy access to your email has brought to you!

It seems that these devices are also very addictive – it’s impossible to ignore that shiny black object in your pocket or bag, and you simply have to check for new messages, all the time! Day and Night. You’ve been Blackburied!

Blamestorming

Brain storming is a method of creating ideas where a group of people sit down and make random suggestions, writing down everything that comes into their heads. The theory is that this should result in creative ideas, and lots of them.

Blame storming is quite similar, but more specific. Blame storming is a method of collectively finding someone to blame for a mistake that no one is willing to confess to. Blame storming is where a group or organisation gets together to pick out a suitable excuse or scapegoat. You might say that after a good blame storming session, the government decided to blame the current problems with the economy on factors beyond their control/the global recession/the previous government etc.

Companies often indulge in blame storming; so do families. But politicians are the real blame storming champions!

Cewebrity

The artist Andy Warhol famously said that he thought everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes, and with the increasing power of the internet, that’s more true today than ever. Anybody with an internet connection and a computer can now become a cewebrity.

A cewebrity is somebody who is only, or perhaps mostly famous through their presence on the internet, an internet personality who crosses over to the mainstream. A web celebrity. A cewebrity.

As people rely on the internet more and more for their entertainment needs, it is becoming increasingly attractive as a platform for new writing, music, film, and art. The writer Stephen King has published books only on the internet and some musicians get a recording contract through the popularity they build up on the web.

Recently an American newspaper, the Seattle PI [Post-Intelligencer] decided to abandon its paper copy and only publish online. As its audience grows, the internet is becoming more powerful in making people famous, and some videos which are posted on the internet become incredibly popular, being seen by millions of people in a short space of time. This is an age where a video of someone dancing and pretending to sing a famous song can get them an appearance on TV shows and magazines. It’s an age of cewebrity!

Floordrobe

Where do you keep your clothes? In a chest of drawers? A closet? Perhaps a wardrobe? Well, if you’re anything like me, quite a few of your clothes at any one time might be on the floor. It makes it easier to select what you want to wear. I – and millions of people like me – call it my floordrobe. It’s a form of storage for clothing which requires no hangers, drawers, doors or effort. Simply drop your clothes on the floor and you have a floordrobe. If a husband and wife are similarly untidy, they might even have a 'his-and-hers' floordrobe. You just enter the bedroom, and there it is – a walk-in floordrobe.

Why go to the trouble of hanging your clothes up when you take them off at night – they’ll be easier to find in the morning if you just leave them on the floordrobe.

Teenagers tend to have the most sophisticated and developed floordrobes. In fact, parents might be completely unaware that floordrobes even exist. They just see a pile of clothes on the floor!

Meanderthal

It’s probably true that people from big cities tend to be much more impatient than people from small towns. Getting from A to B is just so much more difficult with all the traffic and crowds, so people are in much more of a hurry. Also, large towns tend to have a lot of tourists, or people who are a bit lost. So if you’re an impatient city person, desperately trying to get to that important meeting, you might get really angry with the meanderthal in front who is slowing you down by those crucial seconds! You turn left to get past him, and he turns left, you turn right, and he does the same. It’s like a strange dance, in slow motion. You’re going to be late and it’s all that meanderthal’s fault!

To meander means to walk slowly, without any clear direction and a Neanderthal, spelt with N for November, was a kind of primitive person who lived in Europe a hundred thousand years ago – something like a caveman perhaps. So when we call someone a meanderthal, we’re combining these two words, meander and Neanderthal. And we’re actually being very rude. We’re saying that the person in front who is slowing us down is stupid, they haven’t evolved, that they don’t know what they’re doing or where they’re going.

But then, if you’ve ever walked down Oxford street in London at five in the afternoon, rush hour – you might well wonder if some of those shoppers, moving so slowly with a glazed look in their eye, are actually 21st century human beings like you or me. Perhaps they really are meanderthals….

Nearliness

One example of a neologism, or new word, coming into English is 'nearliness'. You might be surprised to hear that it’s a new word, it sounds so right, so everyday. Obviously we’re all familiar with near, and nearly, but nearliness is really new

I first heard it in connection with British tennis players. One player, Tim Henman was very good at getting to semi-finals, and became incredibly popular, but never won any of the most important tournaments. The theory is that, whereas the Americans really love a winner, what the British really like is someone who comes close, without ever actually doing it. This quality we can call nearliness. Tim Henman has now retired, and the new British tennis star is Andy Murray. He’s good – he wins – but does he have what it really takes to be popular in Britain? Does he have enough nearliness?

Nearliness is an example of creating a new word by adding a suffix to an existing word, and so changing its word class. If we take the adverb 'nearly' and add '–ness', we create a noun. So nearliness is the quality of 'being nearly there, but not quite'.

Other possessors of nearliness might include the England football team, who traditionally go out of major tournaments in the quarter-finals, and Paula Radcliffe the marathon runner, who is always the favourite for the Olympics but never quite does it. Lewis Hamilton the racing driver had bucketloads of nearliness after his first year in Formula 1, losing the championship in the last race of the season and finishing second. He lost it all of this last year when he actually won the competition. Very un-British.

Plank

Literally, a plank is a piece of wood often used in the construction industry. There's an expression in English 'as thick as two short planks' which is a negative term for someone who's really unintelligent. Don’t ask me why short planks might be thicker than long ones, that's just what we say.

Well, we've been saying that idiots are as thick as two short planks for a long time, but recently this has been shortened and now, if we think someone isn't very bright, we just called them a plank. We might say, 'You'll never guess what he said to her, he's such a plank!'

I like the word, it sounds right for its meaning …plank.

Also it's not so rude that it would really offend anyone or get you into big trouble. We’ve been using the association with wood in a negative sense for a long time. A wooden actor, is a useless, unable to express emotion. So if someone does something unbelievably silly, you might just quietly say to yourself 'What a plank!'

Shoulder-surfing

In surfing there's a technical term for stealing somebody else's wave. It's called shoulder-surfing. It's very rude and surfers really don’t like it. Well, if you're taking money out of a cash point or ATM in American English, you should be really careful that no-one is standing too close behind you. They may be shoulder-surfing, that’s looking over your shoulder trying to watch you enter your personal identification or PIN number on the keypad. That’s one way of stealing someone’s money – then a pickpocket or mugger will steal your purse or wallet, and rush to the bank before you can cancel your cards.

Shoulder-surfing brings up some interesting cultural points. How close is too close? In Britain and the US, people like at least a metre or two of space between them and the next person – any less than that and they feel uncomfortable. But I’ve been to other countries where people stand right next to each other when they are queuing at the bank, and have no problems at all. Maybe shoulder-surfing doesn’t happen so much there. Or maybe it’s just easier!

Shoulder-surfing might also have another meaning. You know when you are at a party, talking to someone, and they don’t seem to be very interested in your conversation? They seem to be constantly looking over your shoulder, trying to find someone more interesting or attractive to talk to. They want to upgrade to someone better. Well – some people call this shoulder-surfing too! Or maybe this only happens to me …

Staycation

These days people have less and less money to spend on luxuries, things like holidays, for example. So, when they have some time off work, some are choosing to stay at home, instead of flying, or driving perhaps to the beach or mountains, maybe to another country. It’s a staycation, a combination of the words stay and vacation.

Particularly if you live in a big city, you might not get time to enjoy everything that it has to offer in terms of entertainment – to go to the theatre, to concerts or just to go sightseeing. So a staycation might be an attractive idea.

Other reasons to take a staycation might be having very young children, or perhaps you want to make some home improvements, like redecorating. In any case, a staycation will almost certainly save you money! I have some friends from the US who come over to London every year or so and stay with me – so I regularly take some time off and have a staycation. Sometimes I visit them in Seattle, and they have a staycation.

Social notworking

If you want to be successful in business, I’m told that it’s very important to make a lot of effort to meet new people, to socialise and create a network of useful contacts which you can then exploit to advance your career. You meet and make friends with people who might be able to help you later on in your professional life. This is called social networking, and it was one of the buzzwords in business in the 1980s and 90s.

Well, with new technology come new words. After social networking, we now have social NOTworking. Increasingly, people are meeting other people online using websites that intended to make social networking easier. These sites, things like MySpace, Facebook,
Bebo, LinkedIn, Twitter and others – have become incredibly popular. Most people use them as a way of chatting with their friends, and sharing photographs and information about social events – parties, birthdays etc. Some people are even using them to provide regular updates about what they’re doing, often many times each hour. Well, when you do this at work, instead of the many things you should be doing, it’s not social networking, it’s social NOTworking.

If you’re one of those people that use these sites a lot, it can be very tempting to check what your friends are doing tonight while nobody else is in the office, or to see if your friend has put those photos from the last trip you took together on the site yet. It might only take a second … and no-one will ever know. My advice is to check your company’s internet policy and to think about your boss’s attitude before you log in to your favourite site – some employers take a very dim view about social NOTworking!

Source