A dictionary says it has found a new word to represent each of the past 102 years. As if English were so limited. David Rowan and John Ezard report
One of Western youth culture’s handiest, most lethal and (till recently) most universal devices of insult happens to be dropping out of the English language. The negative compliment, as in “She’s a babe – (not!)”, has suddenly dried up in the playground and on the lips of teenagers.
It was epidemic in the mid-1990s. Chambers Dictionary first monitored it on the Wayne’s World television sketches in 1993, though it was current before then. Lexicographers suspected it would prove ephemeral, so they risked leaving it out of their 1993 dictionary.
As a risk, this was comparable with Who’s Who’s gamble in leaving out Ringo Starr and George Harrison in the late 1960s. But last week, with the insult still firmly omitted from their forthcoming 1998 dictionary, Chambers staff were able to feel just as vindicated. “The phrase is still found among restricted groups but has fallen out of general use,” they said. The same, they added, applies to the once-widespread battle-cry “Cowabunga” from the early 1990s film Mutant Teenage Ninja Turtles.
If the lore and language of schoolchildren changes like this in only a couple of years, how can anybody be dogmatic about choosing the words that sum up each year for the whole century since 1896? Collins Dictionaries, with the Times newspaper, tried this last week – and produced an epidemic of bizarre results.
The newspaper defined the words cited by the Murdoch stable-mate dictionary publisher as representative coinages for each year. These were words “which suggest a view of that time and ultimately of the century itself”.
For 1912 – a year most people would link with the sinking of the Titanic – they picked schizophrenia. For 1926, the year of the General Strike, they chose television. For 1939, when Hitler was rampaging over Europe, they selected James Thurber’s day- dreaming character Walter Mitty.
For 1945, the year of Hiroshima, they selected Tupperware; although they did decide to name 1946 after the Bikini atomic test. They had a fair stab at 1950, the year Nato was formed, at 1965 (miniskirt), and at 1956 (angry young man) – though this was also the period of the Suez invasion. However for 1964, largely remembered for Labour’s return to power after 13 years, they went haywire with Moog synthesiser.
For 1987, still identified by many today with the great hurricane, they chose the personal equity plan. For this year, 1997, the word Diana would so far have seemed the safest bet. But Collins and the Times played safe with Blairism.
Most of the exercise looked extraordinarily out of touch, until you realised that it revolved round a quibble of lexicography. Under the attention-grabbing guise of evoking the entire century with each year’s key event, Collins was doing something much drier and more academic. It was tagging each year with words that it claims had first been used in that 12-month period. Which explains – among others – schizophrenia, television, Walter Mitty and the designation of 1929 by the Maginot Line, the French defensive wall which Hitler did not bypass until 11 years later.
The point, however, is that hardly any of the words was widely known in the year it is claimed to represent. “It is a highly misleading list,” says a spokeswoman for Oxford University Press Dictionaries, which has been monitoring words for the last 100 years. “A historian looking at it would get a wholly wrong impression of what people were really thinking about at the time.” “If there’s a point to the list, I can’t see it,” says Della Summers, director of dictionaries at Longman. “The language is so large, it would have been more interesting to have taken the number of words from different areas – science developments for the 1940s and 50s, then business terms, now a huge amount from the entertainment industry. Today, for instance, everyone’s something spice; and from the As, we’ve recently had animatronics, art therapy and airhead.” Idiom, too, would have offered more revealing demonstrations of our linguistic creativity: Summers cites those current favourites “he’s two sandwiches short of a picnic”, the goldfish-inspired “he’s swum round the globe but can’t remember his name”, and, of course, “the wheel’s still spinning but the gerbil’s dead”.
This is, as you may detect, a competitive marketplace. “It’s absolutely cut-throat,” Della Summers says. “You’ve got Oxford and Collins at each other’s throats; I’d be surprised if Chambers were still in the game in two years.”
But the stakes are lucrative: Summers
estimates the dictionaries’ market as worth 5 to 6- million a year. Their popularity “reflects a healthy interest in our language and its changing use,” according to Louis Baum, editor of the Bookseller.
“The fascination with new words is not surprising: stories about new words help give a flavour to our otherwise indefinable age – and a lot of new coinages are intrinsically interesting and humorous.” Last week, of the 5 000 top-selling books in Britain’s high streets and supermarkets, 134 were dictionaries. The Oxford University Press Dictionary was top-seller, with 776 copies sold. Collins’ Gem sold 748, the Concise Oxford 471, the Oxford Dictionary of New Words 259, and Chambers’ First (for children) 246. Dictionaries sell week in, week out – which is why publishers are determined that you regularly read news stories celebrating the new words they claim to have discovered.
New words generally enter dictionaries once they have been spotted by freelance readers or picked out of computerised databases, and verified by editorial teams keen to reject the ephemeral.
Collins uses the Bank of English, based in Birmingham, as the so-called corpus with which it analyses the language. It has more than 320-million words on computer, taken from newspapers, magazines, fiction, leaflets, radio programmes and interviews.
But the most important ingredient is the freelance spotter. Michael Quinion is one of those. A word-scanner for Oxford University Press as well as a computer programmer, he systematically reads 20 to 30 publications regularly and sends in a batch of citations each month. Since 1992, he alone has identified 50 136 distinct new words, or those used in a new sense or which have moved from specialised to general use.
Quinion, too, questions the point of Collins’ project. “The number of new words constantly being produced is so large that you cannot just pick one to exemplify any year,” he says. “And words tend to evolve rather than come to us fully minted and ready for use.”
Gulf War syndrome, for instance, has been pinned down to an article in American Health magazine in September 1994, and in Britain’s New Scientist four months later – yet the term evolved from Gulf War disease, or Desert Storm syndrome, a process evident only in retrospect.
For 1997, Collins chooses Blairite as the representative new word. Quinion cites New Britain as more of a defining term, and perhaps Peyronie’s disease, latterly exposed to popular awareness because of Bill Clinton’s alleged deformity. Oxford University Press, too, has produced for us its own list of words aimed at truly evoking public consciousness for each year. Only two words – Aids and yuppie – coincide with the Collins/Times list, and Oxford University Press dates their impact later.