Come on ! Let us learn the Second Part of Effective Communication. Here are some of those new words and expressions that have recently made it into the language, if not necessarily into dictionaries.
® "Docusoaps"
I was watching a docusoap on the television the other day. A what, you might be saying? A docu-soap. Well, it’s another one of these blend-words, where two words have come together to make a third word. In this particular case, I’m talking about a TV genre, which mixes a documentary programme and a soap. Now the documentary programmes we all know and these are particular fly-on-the wall documentaries we’re talking about now, where people are carrying on their everyday lives, doing their ordinary things and yet being televised or radio-recorded at the same time. Butwhy soap? Why these things are called soap operas? Well that goes back to the 1930s and it was probably because some of the early sponsors of radio programmes at the time and television programmes were soap manufacturers, and so the idea came that a soap was one of these everyday, you know, washing machine kind of dramas. And so a "Docusoap is a documentary attempt to take one of these programmes and put it into an everyday circumstance." ® Shinto
® "Phwoar!"
Interjections are words which express emotions and some of them are very old: words like 'cooer', 'gosh' or 'phew'. You don't get new interjections very often, but one did arrive in the 1980s. It was a sort of expression of enthusiastic desire - usually by a man about a woman. Easy to say 'phwoar!' like that - less easy to write. How do you spell such a thing? All interjections have this kind of problem. Well, I've seen it spelled f-o-o-o-a-r for instance ...all sorts of things beginning with f. But the one that is most widely used these days is p-h-w-o-a-r: 'phwoar!' like that. 'Phwoar' these days could be a man looking at a woman in an enthusiastic way, or a woman looking at a man in an enthusiastic way. ® Shinto
® "Mwah!"
You've seen it on television, or in the street, hundreds of times, thousands of times. Two people come towards each other, they obviously know each other very well, and they start to kiss each other - but it's not a full frontal kiss. No, what happens, one person puts the cheek against the other person's cheek and they have what is often called an 'air' kiss. They make a kissing noise, which shows that they're coming together, as great intimates, but it's not a real kiss at all. And many people then give this air kiss a noise, a word, and it's usually 'mwah', 'mwah' - something like that. It's a sort of 'sound symbolic' word - mwah - it's a lovely way of expressing the actual noise that takes place when you do a phoney kiss of this kind. ®Shinto
® "Dis(s)"
Prefixes, almost by definition, don't occur as separate words. I mean, that's what they're for: they're for modifying a word, occurring before a word and making it change its meaning happy, un-happy, national, de-nationalize and all this sort of thing. They don't normally occur as words on their own. But occasionally they do. You've perhaps heard 'anti' - he's very 'anti' something, a-n-t-i. Or he's very 'pro' something -- well they're prefixes which have suddenly become different words. Now they've been around a long time. A recent one, an absolutely fascinating one, is this prefix 'dis': d-i-s, or sometimes d-i-s-s. It's from the word 'disrespect', to show disrespect to somebody, from the noun, by insulting language, or insulting behavior. It means basically to put somebody down. It's American, black English slang really, and it's been around since about 1980. And what's happened, it's come to be used as a full verb. You can say now 'I dissed him' - to diss or 'Stop dissing her'. And that's the interesting thing, that it's the prefix that's become the verb! It's a most remarkable development. ® Shinto
® "Spam \ Spammers"
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. 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’. ® Shinto
® "Pre-nup"
We often abbreviate words by dropping the endings. There's a technical term for it in linguistics - they're called clippings. I suppose the word 'ad' is the most familiar, from advertisements. 'Pram' is another, from perambulator, and nobody uses that these days, really. And now, we've got 'pre-nup' which came in the 1980s I suppose. It's short for pre-nuptial agreement. In other words, it's two people who're coming together, and they're going to get married, they're going to have their nuptials, they're going to get married - and because they think the marriage is not going to last for very long and there's going to be a messy divorce, where they're going to have to split all their worldly goods, they decide to have a pre-nup, which is an agreement, a pre-nuptial agreement, where they decide who's going to have what, and it's going to save a lot of mess in due course. Funny idea really....but very popular amongst American film stars apparently. How do you write it? Well some people write it pre hyphen nup, but increasingly these days they've been dropping the hyphen, and the two elements are written solid, without any space or any hyphen in-between. The words have come together....not so of course the people they refer to! ® Shinto
® "Showbiz"
It's an abbreviation - showbiz - of show business. And, to begin with, it was written as two separate words: show space biz; still is, to some extent, but increasingly these days, you see it written as a single word, showbiz, and pronounced like that. they used to say in all kinds of circumstances, where something was happening that was rather unexpected, or something was going off the rails, or somebody lost their job, or some special circumstance came up: "That's show biz!" And it was used as an adjective too. "We are going to have a show biz treatment tonight" or "... a show biz tribute" or something of that kind. I heard for instance an adjective form "very show-bizzy" - that's b-i-z-z-y (Spell it as b-i-z-z-y & not b-u-s-y) meaning 'typical of show business'. ® Shinto
® "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". ® Shinto
® "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, It's a mildly mocking word. If somebody says that somebody is "happy-clappy", there's a sort of feeling of distaste about it. 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 Live TV Show. ® Shinto
® "Hotdesking \ Hotdeskers"
You know, there are some very descriptive words that come into the language from time to time, and one of the ones that came in the 1990s which really hit me between the eyes when I first heard it, was this phrase "hotdesking". In fact to begin with, I didn't really know what it meant, and after a while of course, it's become perfectly commonplace now, it's the practice of sharing desks or workstations between office workers, on a sort of rota system. People don't have individual desks, it saves time, and it saves resources. Well, it's a noun, "hotdesking", but I've also heard it as a verb: "we're hotdesking tomorrow", "Shall I hotdesk with you?” you might say to somebody. And now of course there are all sorts of derivatives that've come into being: the people who do the "Hotdesking" are called "Hotdeskers". ® Shinto
® "Wired"
To be wired. Well, if you're talking about electricity that's not surprising I suppose, wires join electrical things. But people being wired? If I say to you "are you wired?" or you say to me, "yes, you're wired"? It's another one of those descriptive words that came in the 1990s, based on technology. It really was referring to the I.T. world, the world where computers connect to the internet, and because your computer was now wired in through a cable into a telephone line, people were said to be 'wired' meaning you are connected to the internet.And so after a while it developed a figurative use. People would say, you know, "are you wired?" andwhat they would mean is, are you ready to handle this, can you talk to me in a reasonably efficient way? Or if say "Jane is wired" it means "oh, Jane can cope with anything, she able to handle all the things that I might throw at her, and her at me". ® Shinto
® "Euro"
No named part of the world has introduced more new words into English than Europe. It's all happened of course in the last 10 or 20 years, and it's this 'euro' prefix that's caused all the attention to be focused upon the area of Europe. It's the prefix 'euro' being used as a blend word along with all sorts of other things. I mean early on, for instance, people talked about 'euro-currency' and 'euro-money', and then the 'euro-fighter' came along, the Defense Establishment's development. ® Shinto
® "Luvvy"
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 ... 'my dear', & Luvvy also possess the same meaning, only the spelling gets changed in the word. The same can be said towards 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'. ® Shinto
® "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 d's: 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. ® Shinto
® "Gob smacked"
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. Gob is the Northern word for mouth. To be gobsmacked - it means to be speechless with amazement. And what you've got is the perfectly ordinary word 'smacked' (to smack). Because it became a very fashionable expression nowadays by people on television, not everybody on television, people like sports personalities having a terrible day, something horrible happens: footballers in particular are always saying that they're gobsmacked at something happening. ® Shinto
® "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 have come 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. ® Shinto
® "Wannabe"
'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 behavior or something like this. ® Shinto
® "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.
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." But Most People Know The Hole-in-the-Wall as a nightclub in Austin, Texas; a community theater in New Britain, Connecticut and a place in Wyoming. ® Shinto
® Ahamed Shinto S » » Silicon Valley of India
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