Welcome to the inaugural new words blog of 2023!
Have you heard of leet (or leetspeak)? It’s a form of communication used online, invented by the users of bulletin board systems 40 years ago, in which words are respelt by replacing certain letters with numbers or other symbols that resemble them. It’s hypothesised to have been created to prevent primitive moderation systems from detecting the discussion of illicit topics. Now, in the era of YouTube and TikTok, we have algospeak, in which emojis, euphemisms and deliberate mispronunciations have joined the arsenals of users looking to evade much more sophisticated detection tools.
Speaking of eras, perhaps you’ll recall that flop era (defined as ‘a period marked by failure and lack of achievement’) was on our 2022 Word of the Year longlist just a few months ago. Also in our database is slay era (essentially flop era’s opposite). Now they’re joined by villain era: a period marked by the prioritising of one’s own needs and desires before those of others. Not particularly heinous as far as villainy goes, perhaps, but many of those embracing the term are young women who are enthusiastically acting against expectations by behaving in this way.
Our next discovery is orthographically interesting: yes, and, which means ‘to encourage someone to pursue an idea, by joining them in their line of thought’. Although we record a fair few nouns which are written with a comma, like the game duck, duck, goose or the shrub yesterday, today and tomorrow, and even a small number of adjectives (all-singing, all-dancing and knock-down, drag-out, for example), this is the first verb with a comma we’ve come across.
Let’s conclude with two weather-themed coinages: windfall tax, which is a tax imposed on companies which have made significant, and often unforeseen profits, and cloud bread, a sweet, light, fluffy bread, usually baked as rolls.
What do you think? Should these words be entered into the Macquarie Dictionary?
