Notes on Neologisms

Spring is coming and it's time to refresh and renew, so we’d like to take this opportunity to bring you up to speed on the rapidly increasing vocabulary of the English language!

 

Thousands of words are being added to our labyrinthine language every year, and even we don't always have an easy time keeping up! With the expansion of social media and the rapid development of technology, the Oxford English Dictionary is positively brimming with new terms and jargon. Here are some of the fun verbs we've come across recently:

 

Trolling: We thought it might be something akin to "strolling with someone who was facially challenged", but no, turns out, trolling is when bored and mean-spirited nerds contribute abusive or plain stupid comments to conversation threads in internet forums and chatrooms ...also known as cyberbullying.

 

Vlogging: (Video blogging!) This is what your nerdy cousin does as a hobby in his spare time. Just do a YouTube search and you're sure to find him vlogging away about a scintillating topic or two!

 

Planking: I am told this is over before it really began, but it’s certainly an interesting craze! Planking is a popular pastime of crazy under-occupied youngsters who seek out unusual places where they can lie down flat in most uncomfortable way (hence the name) and then post the photographic evidence on the net.

 

Owling: The new planking. Finding high-up places to, again, uncomfortably, perch on, like an owl. Capture it on camera and post it on the World Wide Web and you’re guaranteed respect from your peers (or maybe not!)

 

Coneing: This has to be the most ridiculous use of superfluous time for young middle-class, bored Americans with their own wheels. The aim is to elicit surprised or freaked-out reactions from the mainly Latino teenage staff at various drive-thrus when they hand you an ice cream cone and you grab it by the cold end, squeezing it through your fingers and optionally eating some of it. Hmmm.

 

I think I prefer the words for the more old-fashioned pursuits like mooning, scrumping and quetsching, which originate from a simpler era when everyone spent their lives offline! If you don't remember: mooning involves exposing your posterior mostly out of a moving vehicle, scrumping is when local kids climb your fence and help themselves your lovely organic heirloom apples, and quetsching is when you got together with your mates to gossip, before the days when you had to tweet or unfriend someone to get their attention!

 

 

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