Welcome back to another edition of the New Words blog!
My favourite of the five words we’ve curated for you this month is e-changer. It refers to a remote worker who moves from a city to a rural location as part of a lifestyle change. It’s a cute play on sea changer and is very close in meaning to that term, except that sea changers typically move to the coast and need not be remote workers. But were you aware that sea change itself originates from a line in The Tempest? Nowadays, even the words Shakespeare helped coin are getting modern adaptations…
There’s a similar sort of playfulness between another of this month’s words and its etymon. You’ve almost certainly heard of the fashion-related sense of look – as in, for example, ‘a fresh summer look’. However, you might not be aware of lewk, which means (essentially) an especially distinctive look and is appropriately dressed in a new and unusual spelling and pronunciation (which evokes a blend of look and ooh).
Did you know that a yellow flag on a ship indicates it’s in a state of quarantine, and that a yellow flag in motor racing warns drivers there’s a hazard on the track? Well, now a yellow flag can be anything that draws attention to a possible problem, serving as an alert for caution. If, for example, a date’s propensity to spend too much money would be a red flag for you, then all the photographs of their many different lewks posted to social media might be a yellow one.
Rounding things out for this month are magnet fishing, a straightforward coinage for the novel concept of searching for metal objects in bodies of water using magnets, and toolbox talk, a pleasantly alliterative term for an informal meeting in a workplace at which matters of health and safety are discussed.
Over to you – do you think these words are worthy of a place in the Macquarie Dictionary?
