Opinion
Mid-year, words nerds of the world tend to gather in rooms or Zoom, a chance to list what neologisms have emerged, or nominate old words wearing new guises. Call it a check-up, an EOFY overview, gauging the latest in our language.
Chopped, say, does more than describe julienned carrots. Ask Gen-Z, and the word means ugly or undesirable (“girl, that mohair jacket is chopped”). Just as cooked isn’t what’s done with the carrots but slang for exhausted or doomed.
Old hat, you may say. Yesterday’s news. As that’s the catch with neologisms: the moment they’re wheeled onstage, they’re not so neo any more. Consider the Australian swag of allegedly new words the Oxford accepted in its June revamp: donkey vote, arc up, saltie, flannie and yeah-nah. Hardly recent, but lexicographers are finicky doorkeepers.
Across the pond, the American Dialect Society conducted its summer inventory, receiving 900 suggestions that needed sorting and debating. While the usual suspects prevailed, from rage-bait to life hack, there were some eye-catching newbies worth a share.
To reheat nachos, for one, is to recycle another’s idea, often in poorer fashion, thereby gleaning undue credit (“brand Z is reheating Brand Y’s nachos”). Appstinence is resisting your smartphone, in league with mapstinence: to get from A to B satnav-free. Still with tech, AI’s slop has fused into slopaganda and slopslinger, while vapes are now fridge cigarettes.
Mald is another cocktail, combining mad and bald, since only the furious want to tear their hair out. Reminiscent of The Onion, the spoof newspaper, is “fork found in kitchen”, an Insta burn to signal the bleeding obvious, up there with spanner in garage or rat in sewer.
Meanwhile, shrek (large S optional) is a devious verb evoking the manosphere, itself another new term. Draining all charm from the DreamWorks movie, shrekking means dating someone of lower status or lesser looks to hold the relationship’s upper hand. On reflection, however, I’m still unsure if Shrek or Princess Fiona was the original shrekker.
American politics – and its President Voldemort – is a rich source of coinages, of course. As immigration forces (or ICE squads) roam the streets, netizens have resorted to such encoded warnings as icy conditions, or it’s getting cold out there. Even amphifa (a hybrid of amphibian and fascism spawned in Portland) is the dissident movement using frog icons to protest government brutality.
Closer to home, we have the Marrickville pause, that enforced chat-break among Sydney’s inner-west residents to allow for jet noise to abate. Or fambushing: the practice of a family member using their location-sharing app to arrive at a location unannounced, often in want of feeding, favours or cold cash.
Will either word last? They have as much chance as woke pope, No Kings, TEMU Barbie, freedom flotilla or valid crashout – a justified tantrum. Right now, body tea (a TikTok label for a hot physique) is sizzling online, or at least it sizzled last week. Though come December, for the final audit, the compliment will likely run cold, just as reheated nachos will fail to spark a flame, and the anti-fascist frog has predictably croaked. Hence these midyear gabfests around the globe, wrangling neologisms before they’re extinct.
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David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a broadcaster on ABC Radio Melbourne.
