Mind your language
What new word has dominated 2008? Nonebrity, perhaps? No, I have never used it either. It is a portmanteau term for a ‘celebrity nonentity’ and is one suggestion for words of the year proposed by Susie Dent, who appears on Countdown, a programme that anyone claiming incapacity benefit is obliged to watch on pain of disqualification.
Miss Dent popularises philology for the Oxford University Press and, in her recent book Words of the Year, she plays with neologisms such as moofer (‘mobile out-of-office worker’), scuppie (‘socially conscious, upwardly-mobile person’) and funt (‘financially untouchable’). I do not think they are anything but vogue terms. Even if some people understand them today, they’ll be forgotten soon.
Over at Collins Dictionaries, the publicists announced that meh will be added to its 30th anniversary edition. Meh is ‘an expression of utter boredom or an indication of how little you care for an idea’. It derives from the television cartoon The Simpsons. In one episode, Homer is trying to tempt the children away from the television with the suggestion of an outing. They both reply ‘meh’ and when he perseveres, Lisa says, ‘We said meh! Em-ee-aitch, meh!’ This kind of television slang lasts for as long as the television programme is reckoned to be amusing. Some slightly obsessive, nerdish people (men), still think Monty Python is amusing, and recite the whole parrot sketch. I give meh five years.
I am sorry to say that a dull little preposition has triumphed in 2008. It is on and suddenly it has gone critical or passed the tipping point — in the context of urban geography. I keep overhearing ‘on Oxford Street’, ‘on Broad Street’. This, as it happens, is an Americanism. What I cannot understand is why it should suddenly be adopted by English people who have all their lives said ‘in Oxford Street’. There was a film that I am glad to say I never saw, but many did, called Nightmare on Elm Street. It came out in 1984, but people in Britain did not change their usage then.
I do not claim that one cannot say ‘on the street’. The homeless are on the street. Those with homes live in a street. Then, in Little Dorrit, so recently on television too, Mr F’s Aunt, in a very Dickensian touch, says gnomically: ‘There’s milestones on the Dover Road.’ Many things may be on the road, just as Jack Kerouac was. Buildings, domestic or commercial, are in named thoroughfares. But I fear I’ve lost, and 2008 is the year in became on.
Dot Wordsworth
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