A research portal for scholars, the press and the public
The Slang and New Language Archive was created in 1994 while I was Director of the Language Centre at King’s College London. The archive, consisting of a small library of books and periodicals and a number of databases and sub-directories, was designed as a repository for the collection, storage and dissemination of new language, in particular examples of nonstandard varieties of English such as slang, jargon and buzzwords. The archive was later expanded to take in examples of media language, political language, linguistic curiosities and etymologies. It remains a resource, unique in the UK, assisting researchers, students, teachers and journalists, as well as non-specialists, in accessing information about aspects of contemporary language that are under-represented in traditional dictionaries and reference works.
This link will take you to the Archive webpage at King’s College, where there are further links to relevant articles and published sources…
Glossaries from the archive may be accessed on this site by entering keywords, such as slang, jargon, MLE (Multiethnic London English), familect (highly colloquial language used in the home), coronaspeak (language related to the COVID-19 pandemic) and weaponised words (the contentious language of Brexit and populism) and slurs (racist and misogynist terms) in the search box. Once you have accessed a post of interest, check the tags and categories at the foot of the page for other articles or glossaries on the same topic.
Two of the larger archive datafiles are hosted on Aston University’s Institute of Forensic Linguistics Databank site. These are a glossary of current youth slang…
Please note that the King’s archive focuses principally on contemporary language, that is terms used from the twentieth century to the present day. If you are interested in historical slang, I strongly recommend the monumental work by my associate, the British lexicographer Jonathon Green. His dictionary, now generously freely available online, lists current and historical slang terms with timelines and citations illustrating their usage and development…
For more information, for queries, or to donate examples of language, contact me via this website or via the King’s College webpage. I’m on Twitter as @tonythorne007 too.
Fads, Fashions, Lifestyles and Vibes – thirty years on
During 2022 I wrote several times about the new terminology that has been generated by younger generations’ (younger Millennials and so-called Gen Z or Zoomers) online celebration of an accelerated series of Fads, Fashions and Cults (the title of my book on the same topic published back in 1993). I was bemused, but not surprised that my articles and posts received little attention. Those over 40, even if active online or otherwise in touch with the wider culture, seem to pay no attention to what their children and grandchildren are saying, or perhaps just view their activities on social media as trivial, frivolous and ephemeral*. It’s slightly absurd that someone of my advanced age should be trying to record and comment on youth-based popular culture, but, just as back in the nineties, only a few fashionistas and influencers and a handful of style journalists manage to achieve any sort of critical perspective on the high-speed succession of poses, performances and pastiches that plays out on 21st century cyberspaces (and incidentally in teenagers’ bedrooms and college dorms too).
At the end of the year, however, I was asked to contribute to a major press review of these same phenomena, and discussed them with the MailOnline’s science reporter, Fiona Jackson. Fiona had picked up on recent mutations in slang and online jargon, in the novel use of emoji and punctuation, and changes, too, in the accents and intonations used on platforms such as TikTok – in particular the voice affectation known as ‘vocal fry.’
It’s interesting that Gen Z is seen as having a particularly exotic or impenetrable vocabulary, baffling and irritating parents, teachers, journalists and anyone too old to keep up. Inventing new words and changing the meanings of old ones, though, is something that each generation does (see UK millennials with their MLE – Multiethnic London English) and is a natural part of language. Accent is another essential component in curating and projecting one’s identity. ‘Vocal fry’ or ‘creaky voice’ first got noticed and was fiercely debated in the USA in 2015. The low, raspy growling voice tone favoured by female US celebrities has since been imitated by some younger people in the UK, and by British ‘influencers’ online, but not to the same extent. What I have noticed is not specifically vocal fry but something newer and more complex: a UK accent favoured by fashionable younger females which mixes a sort of high-pitched, lisping breathless ‘girly’ delivery with a lower-pitched drawl that can slide in and out of American intonations. Something like this is now prevalent, particularly on TikTok which is where Gen Z goes to influence and be influenced.
In the US now 63% of people aged 13 to 17 use TikTok weekly, a rate that now tops both Snapchat and Instagram. TikTok is also the go-to environment for the celebration of youth fads, fashions and lifestyle trends, not to mention the parodies, mash-ups, spoofs and in-jokes which are central to its video performances. Older people trying to keep up or simply to comprehend what is happening on TikTok or understand what Gen Z is saying and messaging should however beware: I have a suspicion, shared by a few other commentators, that many of the fads, fashions and trends they celebrate (they call them ‘vibes’ or ‘aesthetics’) are not really taken seriously at all by most of them, are passing fancies or simply spoofs perhaps designed to mock the tedious concerns of outdated millennials. Fashionable new ‘looks’ like so-called ‘goblin-mode’ which has, unusually, been noticed and publicised in the mainstream, have been appearing and disappearing on Gen Z platforms with a bewildering speed (see ‘cottagecore’, ‘blokecore’, ‘hag chic’, ‘frazzled English woman’, etc.).
Gen Z, as they come of age and begin to access power and influence in mainstream society, will inevitably affect the way we collectively behave and of course communicate. But there is an interesting phenomenon that those like me who try to track slang and new language have to face up to. That is that it’s quite impossible to predict exactly how language is going change. No so-called linguistic authorities have ever been able to guess how technology and society is going to mutate, or how fast, or which aspects of human behaviour will come to predominate in the future – even in the near-future. Gen Z may settle down into family life and work and become distracted by adult responsibilities, just as we once-radical Boomers, muted, tortured Gen X and much misunderstood millennials have done before them. Or perhaps they will not, and will manage to realise the boomers’ dream of staying radical, innovative and young forever? How their destiny plays out will dictate what they say and how they say it (and they will have to find ways to negotiate their obsessions and describe their changing environments), but I, for one, don’t dare to hazard any more than that.
*She’s much younger than 40, but journalist Marie le Conte struck a contrarian note in the New Statesman, suggesting that we shouldn’t be interested in Gen Z’s predilections…
Its finger still on the pulse of the zeitgeist, the Mail followed up with a warning to older generations that Gen Z disapprove not only of their language and their emoji use, but of their gesturing too (unsurprisingly the hand-signals castigated are all part of my own sad repertoire)…
At the end of January I talked to Karyn Hay of Radio New Zealand about Generation Zed (the preferred term in Wellington and Auckland), their language and online activities…
In February 2023 King’s College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities, host to my Slang and New Language Archive, featured my activities in their Net Gains series…
Following fashions is an exhausting task. And has become more exhausting still.
I have been recording the fads, fashions, cults and trends that energise popular culture, and the labels by which they register themselves on our collective consciousness, for more than thirty years. With the advent of the Internet and messaging the lifestyle innovations, aesthetic novelties and personal badges of allegiance are nowadays free to go viral, go global, and in many cases to disappear, virtually instantaneously. I talked to Olive Pometsey of The Face magazine (itself an iconic vehicle for the propagation of new ideas and images) about the latest, accelerated, overheated iterations of micro and macro-identities competing on online platforms. The equally frenzied quality of much comment and analysis is perhaps conveyed by the notes I made before we spoke…
A crowdsourced, online, free-for-all, 24/7 source of slang, catchphrases and new terminology is my friend Aaron Peckham‘s Urban Dictionary. As the Face article was going to press this was its phrase of the day…
Coined by trend forecaster Sean Monahan, a vibe shift describes the emergence of a “new era of cool.”
Fashion is a realm that experiences frequent vibe shifts, especially with the arrival of a new decade. Gone are the days when frosted tips and low-rise jeans and Abercrombie & Fitch were in.
We’re in the midst of a vibe shift right now with the widespread lifting of Covid-19 protocols and restrictions. We’re going out again and adapting in new ways to our environment; some will survive the shifting tides, and some won’t.
Yeah I’m in my vibe shift right now. You won’t catch me in the club now that things are opening back up again. I’m all about going to the Home Depot, renovating my home and hearth, yknow? Once I tried topless gardening things changed a lot for me.
Those once-thriving subjects, Cultural Studies and Media Studies, which I used to teach in the 1990s, are nowhere to be found in today’s educational landscape, and the cultural practices we used to analyse are these days ignored by most commentators, the subcultures (and microniches, hyperlocal communities) if they are mentioned at all are dismissed by older cohorts as trivial, frivolous and ephemeral. I doggedly persist, in solidarity with The Face, Wire, Dazed, i-D, TikTok, nanoinfluencers and microcelebrities, in finding them fascinating and significant.
Just a few days after the Face article appeared, the MailOnline announced the latest look for Summer 2022…
The themes of the year so far can perhaps be summarised by my hasty posts in passing, on Twitter and elsewhere, in which I considered the keywords trending in the UK’s political and media discourse during the last days of January and the first days of February…
Scurrilous
Rather late to the party – sorry, ‘gathering’ – today’s word is ‘scurrilous.’ Defined by Dr Samuel Johnson as ‘using such language as only the licence of a buffoon could warrant.’ In her resignation letter yesterday Downing Street Policy Chief Munira Mirza accused Boris Johnson of ‘scurrilous’ behaviour when he falsely linked Keir Starmer to the failure to bring paedophile Jimmy Savile to justice. The word first appeared in English in the early 1500s in the form ‘scurrile’, coarsely joking, from the Latin ‘scurrilis’, buffoonlike, itself from the noun ‘scurra’ denoting a fashionable loafer, idler, buffoon, said to be a loan word from Etruscan.
Glee
On 2/2/22, as #BorisJohnson and #jimmysavile jointly trended for the second day, the word ‘glee’ was ascribed to both. It denotes barely repressed mirth/hardly concealed febrile joy and I think describes the desperate glint of triumph in the eyes of the abuser who once again goes unpunished. ‘Glee’ was Old English ‘gliu’, ‘gliw’, ‘gleow’ – entertainment, jest, play, also music and mockery – probably from Proto-Germanic ‘*gleujam’ but its only close relation was the rare Old Norse word ‘gly’ joy. All these are related to Old Germanic ‘gl-‘ words with senses of shining, smooth, radiant, joyful and Celtic cognates such as welsh ‘gloywa’, shining. Dictionary definitions of ‘glee’ note another nuance or connotation (more technically ‘semantic component’) which is often present: ‘exultation deriving from one’s own good fortune or another’s misfortune.’
Airfix nostalgia
As Airfix promoted their 2022 calendar (cover picture above), I was asked again to explain the notion of ‘Airfix nostalgia’, an expression which mocks the delusion whereby nativists, patriots and bigots, most of them under the age of 50, like to imagine that they were personally involved in WWII or the British Imperial project. The reference is to the Airfix plastic modelling kits of fighter planes and warships bought by parents and children in the 50s and assembled at home.
Fib
In among rancorous ongoing denunciations of lying by those in public office (see elsewhere on this site and in this list by Peter Oborne*) came a passing invocation of – or attempt at disculpation by reference to – the lesser offence of ‘fibbing’. A fib is a ‘trifling lie’ or ‘white lie’, so I’m not sure it’s quite the right term in the current context, but it’s from the 1580s, the verb from 100 years later. Its exact origin and first use are uncertain, but it probably began as a jocular version of ‘fable’, perhaps reduplicated as ‘fibble-fable’ and then abbreviated to its modern form.
Rhubarb
When accused of being complicit in the authorising of an airlift of dogs from Afghanistan, PM Boris Johnson described the allegation as ‘total rhubarb’. The colloquial borrowing of the word to mean incomprehensible chatter or nonsense may have its origin in theatrical circles (as noted by Mark Peters in 2015**): it is again a telling choice of words: dated, euphemistic (like ‘mince’ as a euphemism for sh**t which seems similarly to be part of Tory groupspeak), obscure in the sense of being class/age-sensitive, hence condescending.
Endemicity
A new and tendentious, contentious example of #coronaspeak was added to my glossaries on this site in January 2022. The seemingly neutral, technical term was in fact employed in attempts to convince the public that the pandemic was subsiding and the coronavirus morphing into a less lethal presence in the community. Epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani noted perceptively that ‘Endemicity’ is the rebranding of ‘herd immunity’ by the same people who were repeatedly wrong about how close we’ve been to achieving herd immunity. They’re now moving to claiming we’ve reached endemicity, regardless of what the term actually means – just like they did before.’
Lawfare/lethal aid
As the promoter of Brexit Arron Banks sued investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr and the US sent the first aid packages to Ukraine I added two key terms to the #weaponisedwords glossary on this site: #Lawfare, referring to vexatious litigation by a nation or individual, and ‘lethal aid’, a euphemism or (as lexicographer Jeremy Butterfield pointed out to me) a dysphemism for military assistance.
Languishing
In mid-January articles examined the effects of isolation and burnout after nearly two years of restrictions and confinement using a new characterisation of the condition***: ‘languish,’ from the 14th century, meaning to be feeble, listless, moribund or grieving, pining, is from Old French ‘languir,’ from Vulgar Latin ‘languire’ to be weak, faint, idle, from proto-IndoEuropean *'(s)leg’ the ancestor of ‘slack’, ‘lag’ and ‘lax’. ‘Anguish’ is unrelated.
Depravity
Despite the blizzard of slurs and denigrations circulating on social media and in the mainstream press since 2019, some words have been conspicuous by their absence. One such began trending in the UK national conversation, and then only briefly, in mid-January. ‘Depravity’ in the sense of immorality, degeneracy was first recorded in English in 1641, not directly formed from the earlier verb ‘deprave’ (Old French ‘depraver’, pervert, accuse, from Latin ‘depravare’ distort, disfigure) but a version of the noun ‘pravity’ from Latin ‘pravitas’, crookedness, deformity, from ‘pravus’, crooked.
Guile
On January 7 my word of the day was ‘guile’ (first ascribed to the leader of HM Opposition, and then energetically disputed on social media: ‘…it took guile to convince so many on Labour’s left that he was the natural successor to Jeremy Corbyn’ –The Times) The noun, meaning cunning, artful ability to deceive and/or duplicity, was first recorded in the 12th century. It is from Old French ‘guile’ from Frankish ‘wigila’, ruse, from Proto-Germanic ‘*wihl’, ancestor of English wile(s), from Proto-IndoEuropean ‘*weik’, consecrated, holy.
“Postmodernity is modernity without the hopes and dreams which made modernity bearable. it is a hydra-headed, decentred condition in which we get dragged along from pillow [sic] to post across a succession of reflected surfaces, drawn by the call of the wild signifier.” – Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, 1988
Among the toxic terms listed in the glossary of weaponised words, elsewhere on this site*, is a term that has seemed contentious and which has been imperfectly understood since its first appearance in the late Sixties. I included the same word – Postmodernism – in my 1993 book Fads, Fashions and Cults, provocatively subtitled ‘The definitive guide to post(modern) culture.’ When my book, which was aimed at a popular, not a scholarly readership, was launched in Slovenia and featured on national television the Slovene philosopher and critical theorist Mladen Dolar dismissed it as atheoretical and trivial, two other resonant terms which I was not sure whether to resent or to celebrate at the time. An extract from the offending title follows…
Elsewhere on this site I have tried to follow the trajectory of woke**, another, rather different toxic buzzword now favoured by the same side, the opponents of BLM, eco-activism, ‘leftist’ attitudes, in the so-called culture wars that rage on despite the pandemic. In a perceptive review in the New Statesman this week William Davies sets out postmodernism’s trajectory, its recent reimaginings and reiterations by very different interest groups. His article, with his kind permission, is here…
To end with for now, another extract from my antique 1993 guide. I am still pondering the present and possible future of the second p-word, along with other characterisations of our era such as late-modern, techno-modern, post-industrial, post-capitalist and the tension between the post-individual and hyperindividualism, also thinking about the way in which critical positions which were significant for me – Situationism and McLuhanism, for instance – are today ignored or forgotten, and how more recent terms that I think encode important insights – third places, heteroglossia, superdiversity – remain marginal and under-examined. I will try to unpack these musings on these pages very soon…
“Post-Modernism, which deals with the past like one huge antique supermarket, looks very relevant indeed. Pastiche and parody is just an uncomfortable transition to a time when period references will be used without any self-consciousness.” – Peter York, StyleWars, 1980
On Burnout, Decompression, Re-entry Syndrome– and Calling It a Day
Still mulling over the words of Dr Mike Ryan of the World Health Organisation, who described plans by the UK Government for a general relaxation of COVID-protection policies in ten days time as ‘moral emptiness and epidemiological stupidity’, I was invited to join a discussion on London’s Voice of Islam radio station about the notion of ‘Pandemic Fatigue’ and its implications.
The full discussion is here, with my contribution beginning at 44 minutes…
We can see then, that ‘pandemic fatigue’ can sometimes be a useful, neutral, technical designation, and this is how the WHO itself presented it in 2020…
We can become aware, too, that ‘pandemic fatigue’ is a very conflicted term: although used by the WHO and by ‘ordinary’ people to describe their very real exhaustion, it has also been used, like ‘compliance fatigue’ by authorities to blame the public for disobeying…
Despite being locked down myself, in exile for the moment, this was another busy day, with long, mainly heated and indignant discussions taking place on Twitter of what ‘indigenous’ might mean in the context of the UK, triggered by the assertion by Tory MP Andrew Bridgen that the ‘indigenous’ population of the UK will not tolerate immigration. The offending word is an ambiguous and context-dependent term currently. Recent examples have referred to Canada’s First Nations in the harrowing context of deaths in schools where indigenous children were confined. I don’t think it has been used by any reputable specialists in or about the UK, and its use at a time when an England football team of very mixed origins is being celebrated seems crass and provocative. (We don’t know who the ‘original’ inhabitants of the British Isles were, because there was no written record until 55 BCE, but they certainly immigrated, or invaded and colonised as did all the subsequent settler groups.)
On BBC Radio Bristol I once again answered listeners’ queries on the the etymology of popular expressions. This time, perhaps aptly in present circumstances, the phrase was ‘call it a day.’ First recorded in 1838 by US writer Joseph C Nolan in hisCharcoal Sketches – A Study in the Humor of the Old Northeast, it was in the form ‘call it half a day’ and seems to have reflected the mixed feelings of weariness and resistance on the part of workers from the Philadelphia slums, deciding to knock off early or to award themselves a half-day holiday. By 1919, as the USA wearily emerged from war, the usage had mutated into ‘call it a day’: in 1938 ‘call it a night’ was first recorded.
I called it a day myself, at nine o’clock on a warm evening, pleased to have been awarded nine out of ten in a facetious Twitter competition for a photo of my hand, and recalling the louche philosopher Gurdjieff’s realisation that he had progressed from drinking from glasses to drinking from “what are called ‘tumblers'”…
There are several articles on jargon elsewhere on this site, and in 2018 I wrote about the proliferation of acronyms and their effect on listeners and readers too (that article is here*). Now in 2021 the cult ‘appointment television’ crime series Line of Duty has reignited debate on the status of codes and abbreviations as a mainstay of officialese and the private, exclusive languages that both fascinate and intimidate the public. The long-running hit police drama The Bill is due to return to screens very soon, no doubt introducing civilians to some updated terminology and slang of its own.
In March I spoke to Amit Katwala, who was researching this topic for Wired magazine, and the resulting article is here, followed for any students, teachers – and fans of Line of Duty – by a list of links to sources of both real-life and fictional acronyms and discussion of them…
While the Sun satirises them, the Guardian has perceptively gone beyond the linguistic challenges and plot contortions in Line of Duty and detected underlying references to current political realities…
In trying to make sense of their new circumstances, under lockdown, in social isolation or distancing, ‘ordinary’ people are at the mercy of, and must come to terms with new language, some of it unfamiliar and difficult to process, some pre-existing but deployed in new ways.
I am using the shorthand #coronaspeak for all the novel expressions that the crisis has generated (US linguist Ben Zimmer coined the alternative ‘coronacoinages’, but my examples are not all new coinages, some are adaptations or existing terms). Phrases such as ‘social distancing’, ‘self-isolation’ have become familiar, even if their meanings are still to some extent contested. But in a society in which, we are told, around 5 million UK citizens cannot even access the internet, how are we to negotiate this rise in ‘lexical load’, this ‘lexical overload’?
I’d like to consider first the ‘medicalisation’ of everyday language: the way in which technical terms from the jargon of sciences and healthcare cross over into popular usage. Some of these words and phrases seem transparent, even if their histories and implications are actually complicated. ‘Social distance’, for instance, was previously employed in sociology and psychology for, in the words of Dr Justin Thomas, ‘how close we are happy to get to members of an outgroup, e.g. would you be happy to marry a [insert outgroup here]’ and many, including the World Health Organisation – WHO – with hindsight have proposed that ‘social distancing’ (also criticised for being an oxymoron) be replaced by the more literal ‘physical distancing’ in present circumstances. A phrase like ‘test-vacuum’ can seem ambivalent or opaque, but in the current context refers specifically to the failure of the UK authorities to emulate Germany in carrying out mass testing of the population. Even the most basic concepts like testing, tracing are actually very difficult to unpack, especially as the official narrative on these pivots constantly – at times, it seems, deliberately.
There are, unsurprisingly, regional variations in the preferred terminology: quarantine in official and popular usage and shielding in place describing a policy protocol are heard relatively rarely in the UK; cocooning likewise, though it is a central plank in health policy in Ireland. There are also novel and forbidding coinages which at first defy interpretation, even if they describe something otherwise indescribable: I was recently warned against ‘epistemic trespassing’ which means, in the words of one Twitter contact, ‘when some idiot second guesses a specialist, e.g. when a cartoonist pronounces on epidemiology’
Some other examples of words which have transitioned into the national conversation, moving from technical or specialist registers into general usage are listed here with comments…
Pathogen – an organism that causes disease, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi
Antigen – in immunology a toxin or other foreign substance which induces an immune response in the body, especially the production of antibodies
Viral load – the total amount of viral particles that an individual has inside them and may shed
Respiratory – relating to the organs of the body responsible for breathing. When pronouncing, the word used often to have the stress on the first syllable, but more recently the stress is usually placed on the second (‘pir’)
Ventilation – the use of artificial methods to assist breathing
Proning – requiring intensive care patients to lie on their front to reduce their need for oxygen
Incubation period – the time between being exposed to a virus and becoming aware that one is infected
Intubation – the inserting of an endotracheal tube (ET or ETT) through the mouth and into the airway of a patient to assist breathing: extubation describes its removal
Pandemic – an epidemic – a quickly spreading disease – which has spread very widely and infected a high number of individuals
Vectors (of transmission) – agents such as infected individuals that transmit infectious pathogens into a population
Contact tracing – identifying, then assessing and monitoring those who have come into contact with an infected individual.
Flatten the curve (popularised to ‘squash the sombrero’) – to slow the spread of a virus, for instance by social containment measures, so that fewer people need to seek treatment at any given time. The term is epidemiologist jargon, but has been criticised as being a euphemism
PPE – personal protective equipment used to shield the wearer from work-related hazards
Palliate – means to make (a disease or its symptoms) less severe without removing the cause. hence ‘palliative’ care where no cure is possible. Ironically, ‘palliate’ can also mean to disguise the seriousness of (an offence)
Psychoneuroimmunity – the desirable state achieved by way of ‘preventive strategies of healthy lifestyle, regular exercise, balanced nutrition, quality sleep and a strong connection with people’
Furlough(ed) – appearing in English in the 17th century, the word is related to Dutch verlof, leave, and refers to the granting of a paid leave of absence. The term was employed in British military jargon during WW1 but until now was generally considered an Americanism
Mitigation – the reduction of the severity of symptoms
Immunocompromised – having a weakened immune system, hence less able to fight infections and other diseases
Comorbidity – one or more illnesses or diseases suffered by a patient at the same time as a primary condition
Harvesting effect – a temporary increase in the mortality rate when secondary factors such as underlying health conditions add to the number of victims of an epidemic
Patient zero – the first case or the first documented patient in an epidemic
Red zone – a geographical area or location classified as having the highest levels of infected individuals and which should be placed under quarantine
Super-spreader – an infected individual who transmits the infection to a higher than average number of others
Asymptomatic – displaying no symptoms of an infection. Infected individuals who are asymptomatic are sometimes known as ‘silent carriers’. The term began trending again in the light of the second wave in October 2020, sometimes in the variant form asymptomic
Hot spot – a cluster of, or a location showing a concentration of cases of infection
Petri dish – literally a shallow dish in which biologists culture cells in a laboratory. Now commonly referring to an enclosed environment in which infections can spread unchecked
Cluster effect – the result of concentrations of people at social gatherings, often in public places, enabling an accelerated spread of infection
Shielding – by or for the most vulnerable individuals, this means taking the most stringent measures in order to minimise interaction
Shelter in place – a US security protocol whereby citizens are warned to confine themselves, originally in the event of chemical or radioactive contamination
Crisis triage – emergency short-term assessment and assignment of treatment of individuals suffering from sudden overwhelming medical or psychological symptoms
Peak surge – a term properly used in relation to power surges in electric circuits but used now to describe the maximum level reached in an accelerating increase in cases of infection
Fomite – an inanimate object contaminated with or exposed to infectious agents (such as pathogenic bacteria, viruses or fungi), which can transfer disease to a new host.
Zoonotic diseases – infections which spread from animals or insects to humans, also known as zoonoses
Donning, doffing and disposing – putting on, removing and disposing of PPE (personal protective equipment) in official medical parlance
R rate – R0 (‘r-nought’) is a mathematical gauge of the reproduction rate of a contagious disease
Behavioural fatigue – a supposed reluctance to adhere to social conduct norms, should imposed strictures, such as containment and confinement, continue for too long
Seroprevalence – the number of persons in a population who test positive for a specific disease based on blood tests, a measure of cumulative infection
Anosmia – loss of the sense of smell, and in some cases also taste
Pod – a self-contained unit of confinement such as an isolation pod in a medical facility, a social contact or family pod providing space for personal interaction during quarantine. Bubble is used in the same sense in some settings
Immunity passport – a proposed certificate issued by national authorities confirming that the bearer is free from infection
Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) – actions, apart from vaccinations and medicine, that people and communities can take to help slow the spread of contagious infections, also known as community mitigation strategies
Aerosol transmission – the spread of infection via tiny, lingering airborne liquid particles rather than by exhaled droplets or fomites (contaminated objects)
Long COVID – the experience of those who have recovered from initial coronavirus infection but continue to suffer from a range of significant symptoms
Transmission advantage – the ability of a mutant strain of a virus to spread more quickly than the prevalent version of the infection
Zero Covid – a strict containment strategy or policy typically involving total shutdowns
Surge testing – additional community testing offered and encouraged in areas where mutations of the coronavirus have led to a sudden increase in cases of infection, even by asymptomatic individuals
Booster dose/shot – a third vaccination for those who have already received two
Plan B – a set of precautionary measures outlined by the UK government in September 2021, potentially to replace those in place, in the event of a surge in infections at the onset of winter. Medical experts unsuccessfully urged the government to move to this level of response in October.
Critical incident – a set of circumstances (as in January 2022) requiring special emergency responses, defined by the NHS as ‘any localised incident where the level of disruption results in the organisation temporarily or permanently losing its ability to deliver critical services, patients may have been harmed or the environment is not safe, requiring special measures and support from other agencies’
Endemicity – a ‘dynamic equilibrium’ in which infection rates stabilise in a society, allowing management of the pathogen
Primacy effect – the psychological phenomenon whereby the earliest in a list of successive instructions remains the most influential, as with public perceptions of the importance of hand sanitising when this is subsequently shown to be relatively ineffective.
I am still appealing for contributions to my lexicon via this site, on Twitter or by email, and will thank and credit contributors where possible. My next posts will look at slang and colloquialisms and newly invented expressions related to Covid-19.
For the terms considered here I am very grateful to, among others, Professor Carmine Pariante, Alan Pulverness, Nigel McLoughlin, Gail Jennings and Julian Walker
There is a comprehensive glossary of coronavirus-related technical terminology, published in Canada and updated weekly:
I belatedly became aware of the important response by linguists to the pandemic in China, and to the novel concept of emergency linguistics. More details of the role of language in that context can be found here:
Colleagues at King’s College London are looking beyond the Anglosphere at the ways in which language is used both to react to and to construct the realities of the global crisis:
One year later and abiding problems are covid-denial, vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal. Professor Elena Semino continues her research into the framing and metaphorical features of pandemic-related communications:
Another intriguing aspect of corona-discourse is the use of phraseology in reporting and in messaging, as described in this retrospective from September 2021:
I talked last week to New York-based journalist Zoe Henry about the worst buzzwords of the year so far, and her article for Inc.com follows.
Here, first, are some of the points that came up in our conversation.
‘I think we can and should distinguish between business or corporate buzzwords (like ‘disruption’, ‘digital native’, ‘pivot’), political buzzwords (‘libertarian’, ‘alt-right’, ‘antifa’, ‘fake news’ in the US; ‘brexiteer’, ‘remoaner’, most recently ‘mutineer’ in the UK) and lifestyle buzzwords (‘side-hustle’, ‘woke’, ‘influencers’). There are however some words that overlap these categories: ‘resilience’ is one that is still trending in the UK in 2017, ‘storytelling’ and ‘holistic’ are others. I think it’s especially significant that examples of political/sociocultural discourse like ‘weaponize’, ‘elite’, ‘toxic’, and slangy terms like ‘snowflake’, ‘cuck’ or ‘libtard’ have dominated the conversation on both sides of the Atlantic in 2017. These are expressions that both reflect and evoke the unprecedented conflict and division in society that have been witnessed since the US election and the UK’s EU referendum.
Tedious buzztalk has increasingly involved generational or generationalist categorisation, conflict or prejudice: ‘Generation Z’, ‘parennials’, ‘centennials’ – ‘snowflakes’ again – are examples of the terms in use: opinion pieces listing millennials’ supposed failings or misdeeds are commonplace. This kind of language is evidence of commerce, politicians and the media trying to stage and exploit imagined or real ‘disconnects’ between babyboomers, millennials and the intervening Generation X, not for the common good but for their own devious purposes.
A word like ’empathy’ – an existing word and concept which suddenly starts trending -may be annoying when it’s over-used but points to something important happening in society. In this case the need to refocus on this quality in a divided, hypercompetitive and often uncaring environment.
Nearly all buzzwords follow the same trajectory:
A buzzword appears and catches on because it defines some important innovation (‘AI’ for example or ‘fintech’, ‘blockchain’, ‘cryptocurrency’, ‘algorithm’ or ‘internet of things’) – a new device, process, way of behaving, a fashion or fashion item or fad. The ‘buzz’ comes about naturally if the new concept is truly significant, or artificially because it is hyped by the media.
People who want to appear up-to-date or ‘cool’ adopt the buzzword (whether they fully understand it or not – ‘digital’ or ‘mindfulness’ are often cited, ‘portability’ is another offender) in order to impress – or if they are part of the corporate sphere, to assert their power, to dominate. The user of the jargon presents themselves as an informed progressive insider: those who don’t use the jargon are excluded or subordinated.
The buzzword is over-used and becomes a cliche: the phrase ‘reach out’ and the word ‘craft’ are cases in point. It may be ridiculed and mocked by sophisticates, castigated by self-appointed guardians of traditional language (but some people will go on using it nevertheless).
Buzzwords eventually fall out of favour but this doesn’t happen quickly. Terms like ‘think outside the box’, often singled out in surveys as a recent irritant have actually been ‘on trend’ for a decade. ‘Frictionless’ has been around for some time but is just now at peak popularity, while one of Macmillan’s Dictionary’s words of 2017, ‘maximalism’ featured in Shoot the Puppy, my dictionary of buzzwords published in 2006, (which also listed the by-then-ten-year-old metaphorical meaning of ‘bandwidth’, on Zoe Henry’s hitlist and discussed today by Merriam Webster’s word-watchers: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-is-the-new-meaning-of-bandwidth)’
(On a personal note I must admit that there are some labels or catchphrases that, however contentious or ludicrous they are, don’t especially upset me: both ‘centrist dad’, coined in the UK to deride middle-aged males who are too liberal either to embrace the left or attack the right, and ‘hand-wringing metropolitan elitist’, a slur beloved of conservatives, if I’m honest seem to describe me perfectly.)
Here, then is Zoe’s article, with her own selection of 2017’s worst buzzwords:
…And here is my earlier piece on the same subject from The Conversation in which I try to make the point that buzzwords may not always merit only condemnation:
…Coincidentally, 24 hours after the above was posted, Andre Spicer, castigator of ‘business bullshit’, writes in The Guardian. He makes the rarely made historical connection between jargon and the terminology of therapy, but his condemnation of all ‘management speak’ is not nuanced enough to my mind:
An update from February 2020: the anti-jargon polemics continue, unabated and tediously repetitive. This is a little more detailed, more thought-provoking piece from Molly Young at Vulture:
Business jargon – the buzzwords, catchphrases, clichés and mantras of corporate life – manages to be perennially fascinating and endlessly irritating. Many of the better-known expressions have an air of novelty despite being in existence for many years, and survey after survey lists the same serial offenders as the triggers of office rage, headdesking and facepalming. The very latest take on this subject, visualising the metaphors we take for granted, is provided here, courtesy of Citrix ShareFile‘s illustrator David Doran, writer Kevin Hill and by kind permission of Search Laboratory’s Senior Media Specialist Jennie Lindehoff…
tony thorne 