The Language Report 2007

This is the latest of Susie Dent's yearly surveys of new words and expressions in English. The explosion of new language in the early years of this century seem to have slowed down a little, so this year her report is more like a survey of the last half decade. She identifies war, rapping, and technology as the key areas for the development of new terms.

Of these, war seems to generate the ugliest cases of euphemism: constructive engagement, which means killing people; the now famous extraordinary rendition, which means deportation to be tortured; and choice jargon such as Blue on Blue, which means killing somebody on your own side. It's well worth exploding the false metaphors and empty rhetoric of these expressions, because they conceal the truth that people are being killed, bombed, and terrorised.




She claims that there are approximately nine hundred new words coined each year. Her information and statistics are drawn from the Oxford English Corpus, which records these matters. But new words need to survive a while in order to qualify for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The latest buzzword she identifies is granularity, which is used as an alternative to the more humble detail,and she points to those terms which, sparkling new only a couple of years ago, are now part of our everyday lexicon. Words such as chav, bling, blog, and metrosexual.

She covers all the political distortion and abuse of language which characterised the Blair years - spin, on message, and Cool Britannia, and ground zero is offered as an example of a recent usage which entirely supplants its previous meanings - which in this case was the hole left in the ground by an atomic bomb.

There's also a consideration of how English is spoken - including by the Queen.

In 1952 she would have been heard referring to thet men in the bleck het. Now it would be that man in the black hat ... Similarly, she would have spoken of hame rather than home. In the 1950s she would have been lorst, but by the 1970s lost.

And Dent also picks on language spoken at the other end of the social scale in a section dealing with the 'haitch' issue, which is so revealing of uneducated speech - as in working for the En - Haitch - Ess or someone having a Pea - Haitch - Dee.

She makes realistic distinctions between enterprises which invent their own obfuscating jargon (recalibrating and disincentivising) both of which mean 'firing staff', and genuinely creative terms such as lifting the kimono, which means 'revealing hitherto undisclosed information'.

There's not much new slang this year - only confirmation that booty refers positively to female buttocks. But she throws in a lively chapter which explains the puns, allusions, and linguistic jokes of tabloid headlines.

There are some interesting developments in the fusion of Asian language with English to produce inventive terms such as timepass, which means hobby, and prepone, which means to bring something forward. And I'm glad to see that unlike previous editions of The Language Report, an index has been added.