Introduction

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.

Professor David Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on language. He has recorded 26 short talks on some of these words and expressions that have recently made it into the language, if not necessarily into dictionaries.

Hole-in-the-wall

Hole-in-the-wall is one of those phrases where you get a lot of words hyphenated, if you wrote it down: hole-in-the-wall, being used as a single word, as a noun. "'I'm going to the hole-in-the-wall"' you might say or "'I'm getting some money out of the hole-in-the-wall"'. Well you can see what it means, it means an automatic cash dispenser - one of those installed in the outside wall of a bank or some other money-giving organisation.

It's British colloquial; it's not used as far as I know in the States, or in Australia, or anywhere, although I wouldn't be surprised if it spread a little bit - always written with hyphens. Very unusual to see phrases of this kind and sentences being used in this way, as single words. But if you listen out for them, you'll find them - especially being used as adjectives. Have you heard people for instance say "'he's a very get-up-and-go-person"'? Now there's the sentence 'get up and go'. To say a "'get-up-and-go-person"' means somebody who's got lots of oomph inside them, lots of enthusiasm. Or if I give you a "'come-hither-look"' - a "'come-hither-look"': come here - come hither. Another phrase being used as an adjective.

You can try them out as a sort of game. "'Who do you think you are?"' is a common enough expression - so you can make it an adjective and say "'he gave me a who-do-you-think-you-are sort of look"'. Make it even longer if you want: "'he gave me a who-do-you-think-you-are-and-why-are-you-looking-at-me sort of look"' - but there is a limit to the length you can make an adjective. Don't go on for too long, you'll run out of breath!


Extra information
Katherine, Chicago, IL, USA writes:
In his explanation of "hole-in-the-wall", Professor Crystal says that it means an ATM, and the term is not used in the United States. It's true that we don't use hole-in-the-wall to describe an ATM. But we do use it to describe a small, modest, and out-of-the-way place, like a diner or a rundown cafe.

For example: "My apartment is just a hole-in-the-wall, but my rent is so low I can't complain."

"Instead of going to a fancy restaurant, let's visit some family-owned hole-in-the-wall."

The Hole-in-the-Wall is a nightclub in Austin, Texas; a community theater in New Britain, Connecticut and a place in Wyoming that once served as a hideout for the legendary gunmen Jesse James and Butch Cassidy.

Saddo

There are quite a few familiarity markers in English - words which take on an ending to make the word sound much more familiar, or everyday, or down to earth. Ammunition becomes 'ammo'; a weird person becomes 'weirdo'; aggravation becomes 'aggro'. They like it in Australia a lot - "good afternoon", they don't say that so often, but 'arvo', 'arvo' is the abbreviation for afternoon in Australia.

And in the 1990s you had this rather interesting word 'saddo' - that's the adjective sad with this 'o' ending, spelt with two ds: s-a-d-d-o. It came in as a kind of a rude word really, a mocking word for somebody seen as socially inadequate, or somehow rather unfashionable, or contemptible in some way. You might hear somebody say, "oh, he's a real saddo" or "she's a real saddo" - it can be for male or for females.

It's from the word sad of course, from oh, way back in the 1930s, where 'sad' here doesn't mean miserable, it means pathetic, and that was a use of sad that came in at that time. It's a sense in other words that's been developing for quite a long time. In actual fact, you can take that sense of sad and trace it all the way back to Shakespeare, although he never said 'saddo'.

Toy boy

There's a class of very unusual words in English, they're called "reduplications" or "reduplicated forms": "bow wow, says the dog". Well, you can hear the reduplication, the two words are almost the same, it's just the first part changes: "helter-skelter", "namby-pamby"...

Words like this are reduplicated forms, and new ones are really rather unusual. But "toy boy" has come along in the last 10 or 15 years. It's British slang, from the 1980s. It refers to an attractive young man being kept as a lover by another person, by an older person, that?s the crucial thing: the older person is keeping the younger man as that person?s "toy boy".

It's the rhyme that made it popular. "Toy girl" seems rather boring by comparison.

Happy-clappy

This is one of those reduplicated words, where the two words are almost the same, but they just change one little part: change the vowel, or change the consonants in this particular case - usually the consonant at the front, like "willy-nilly" - and "Ping-Pong" is one where the vowel changes.

Well "happy-clappy" came in in the, oh 1980s I suppose, referring to a member of usually a Christian charismatic group, characterised by enthusiastic handclapping and a very extrovert emotion, set of emotions being expressed - but it isn?t restricted to that. I've heard it used in all sorts of other contexts as well. It's a mildly mocking word. If somebody says that somebody is "happy-clappy", there's a sort of feeling of distaste about it.

And the thing is, that the idea has moved beyond the religious circumstance now. It refers to anybody showing some kind of extrovert emotion, some kind of rather superficial feeling very often. You might say of somebody "he's got a very happy-clappy attitude". It means he's just producing his emotions without much thought all the time. So anybody who gets very enthusiastic and suddenly becomes a little over the top ... starts to act out something... I'm now getting very happy clappy about all this ... 'cos I'm so happy to be on the radio, and now ... well, this isn't really very appropriate for the BBC, is it?

Make my day

Of all the mediums that influence language, I think film is the one that has the most effect. Not so much from the point of view of pronunciation and grammar. I don't think we pick up very many sounds and grammatical instructions from the films we see – but the catchphrases. Right from the earliest days of film, catchphrases have been extracted from the film medium and "make my day" I think is one of the most famous.

Well, you may remember it, it's Clint Eastwood, isn't it, playing Dirty Harry in the film Sudden Impact. He invites an armed thug to take him on and Clint Eastwood is holding a very big gun – so he's just waiting for the thug to do something horrible, and he says "go ahead, make my day!".

Well it just caught on, it spread in meaning – people started using it, of course not with guns in their hands, they started using it within a sort of ironic circumstance. To say "make my day" means "do something that'll really please me". It implies a really big deal or something like that. In fact Clint Eastwood himself, when he was being elected mayor of Carmel, went round the whole of his little town, his little city, with a T-shirt on - "elect me mayor – make my day!"

Luvvy

Have you noticed how common the 'y' ('ie') ending is in English as a sort of colloquial suffix? A familiarity marker perhaps is a better way of talking about it. You talk about the telly - it's a television. You talk about your auntie - instead of your aunt. Of course, there's mummy and daddy as well. People from Australia are Aussies as well as Australians, and of course in proper names you talk about Charles and Charlie, or Susan and Susie. Very very common suffix.

Not surprising then to find that new words every now and then come into the language which use it, and the one that has attracted a lot of interest recently is 'luvvy' and 'luvvies' - l-u-v-v-y and l-u-v-v-i-e-s. Especially in Britain, it's a kind of mockery for actors and actresses, considered to be rather affected - actors, you know, who turn up and call each other 'darling' all the time and go 'mwah' at each other, when they're kissing each other, and people say "oh, listen to those luvvies talking, those poor luvvies - there's lots of luvvy talk going on" - l-u-v-v-y.

Now what's interesting is it's the spelling that's made this word so new, because there already was a word 'lovey' in the language, going back right to the 1960s, spelt l-o-v-e-y. It's a much older term of endearment. I might say "oh, come on, lovey!" meaning ...you might hear from a bus conductor for instance, and it refers simply to you know, 'my dear', and it could be to a man or a woman, more usually to a woman. So, what we've got is a new word 'luvvy' with a different spelling from the old word 'lovey' - now that doesn't happen very often in language change.

Gobsmacked

English loves compound words: 'washing machine' and all that sort of thing. But when you get a compound word, the two parts of the compound are usually stylistically very homogeneous, in other words, they are the same style: formal first part - formal second part, and so on. You don't usually get a compound word where the first part is a slang thing and the second part is a rather ordinary or formal thing - they don't usually mix - but gobsmacked is a perfect exception to that rule.

To be gobsmacked - it means to be astounded, flabbergasted, speechless with amazement. And what you've got is the perfectly ordinary word 'smacked' (to smack) and a Northern word 'gob'. Gob is the Northern word for mouth. I used to live in Liverpool for many years and you'd say to people "ah, shut yer gob", you know, and it simply means, mouth. So, to be 'gobsmacked' is to be struck dumb as if by a smack in the face.

Now, it's got a more general use these days than just in the North. I've heard it used throughout the South of England - I've heard it used abroad; it's now very widely used to be gobsmacked. Now, why? Because it became a very fashionable expression by people on television, not everybody on television, I'm thinking especially of people like sports personalities having a terrible day, something horrible happens: footballers in particular are always saying that they're gobsmacked at something happening.

Wannabe

A very unusual feature of SOME languages, and of English in particular, is that you can have phrases that can be used as words: a phrase used as a word! 'Wannabe' is a good case in point. It's of course a colloquial version of "want to be" - wannabe: w - a - double n - a - b - e - sometimes with two e's at the end. If I say "he's a wannabe", what I mean is he's an admirer or a fan; somebody who wants to emulate a celebrity by copying that celebrity's dress or behaviour or something like this.

It actually started back in the United States sometime in the 1980s. I think it first became very popular when people wanted to be like Madonna the pop star. Certainly that's when I first heard it very very regularly and a 'wannabe' person is someone who wants to be as famous, or just get some reflected glory from the person, in this case Madonna, that they were admiring. It reflects the colloquial pronunciation.

Notice, it's not a very polite expression. You can talk about other people as being wannabes, but you wouldn't say that you yourself were a wannabe, and if you say about somebody "he's a wannabe", you're really being a little bit sceptical about that person's state of mind I think, to some extent. But it's a very popular term - you'll hear everybody use it these days.


Extra information
Elisabeth from USA writes:
The term "wannabe" started in America after the movie "The Godfather". Before the movie most Italian Americans were very quiet about the Mafia, after the movie, some people were so proud that they wanted to say they were part of it too. So to answer the question is he in the Mafia - no just a wannabe (I think it started in New York). Also,another term: everyone became "connected" meaning they knew of or said they know someone in the Mafia as in "he is connected".

Spam

Technology always has an influence on language. When printing came in, it brought new words into the language. When broadcasting first started new words came into the language. And now the internet has come along so it’s not surprising that quite a large number of new words have come into English vocabulary since, especially the last 10 years really since the world wide web came into being. And of course if you’ve got emails, and most people have these days, then you will have encountered the word Spam. Spam flooding your email box with ads or other unwanted messages. But why the word Spam for this sort of thing?

Spam was originally a tinned meat back in the 1930s, a brand name for a particular kind of cold meat. But it became very fashionable when Monty Python, the satirical television comedy series back in the 70s and 80s they had a sketch where just for fun they had spam with every item on the restaurant menu - bacon and spam, egg and spam, ham and spam, spam and spam. Spam spam spam spam… and they actually sang a song about it and it caught on.

And therefore it became a real part of the language meaning any unwanted material of any kind and so when the internet came along it wasn’t surprising really that spam became part of that kind of experience. And the evidence that it’s become part of the language is not just because of the noun spam which you might expect to see in the internet context but because it’s generated other kinds of linguistic expression as well.

You’ve now got verbs based upon it, and adjectives based upon it. You can now have ‘I’ve been spammed’ or ‘somebody’s spamming me’ and the actual people who do the work themselves who send all these horrible emails out to everybody so that we’re flooded with these things, what are they called? Well there’s a new noun, they’re called ‘spammers’.

Bog standard

It's pretty rare in English to find a compound word with a slang first part and a formal second part. Bog standard is one of those that's come in in the last few years. It means...what does it mean? It means to be basic, to be ordinary, to be unexceptional, to be uninspired - it just means ordinary. If you say something is 'bog standard', you mean it is perfectly ordinary. "He's got a bog standard car" means a perfectly ordinary car. "I've got a bog standard library book" means I've got a perfectly ordinary library book that's not exceptional or interesting in any way.

It's a British slang thing; its origin is quite obscure; nobody quite knows where it came from. Some people think that it's actually from early motorbike sales, because motorbikes used to come in a very large box you know when they were delivered ? you didn't sort of drive them away, they were delivered. They came in what's called 'box standard' - and then that became 'bog standard'; in other words, out of the box, it's a perfectly ordinary kind of delivery, or ordinary kind of a bike that you bought.

But people don't like that and they think that it's got a much more interesting etymology than that: a bog of course is a slang word for toilet in British English, and some people think that 'bog standard' has that kind of origin. Don't see it myself, somehow. I rather like the idea that bog means something rural, you know - the rural people are often in the bog, 'cause the bog's a muddy sort of area, full of peat and things like that. And so bog is often used to mean 'unsophisticated'. So I don't know: there's three possible etymologies for it; nobody quite knows where it comes from. It may have an ordinary meaning, but it certainly isn't an ordinary word.

A LITTLE DIFFERENCE CAN MAKE A HUGE DIFFERENCE.