The Language Report 2006

This is the fourth of Susie Dent's annual compilations of new language. She had hits in the last few years with the language report and larpers and shroomers, then fanboys and overdogs which brought us smack up to date with the latest language being coined on the street, in the media, and on the Internet.

Basically she offers reports from the sharp end of language change. Some of these terms may make it into the dictionaries, others won't. It's only a couple of years ago that she was wondering about the possible longevity of blog and chav, yet now they seem to have been with us for ever. And as she points out, not all terms which come into vogue may be new. They can be specialist terms which are given currency by some dramatic event. For instance, twelve months ago, who outside a few specialists had used the term rendition?


This year she identifies three new general trends - Jafaikan (a fake mixture of Jamaican and African), Offlish (office English). and MLE (multi-cultural London English). But as she points out, new terms are only about one percent neologisms: most new words come about from the addition of prefixes and suffixes to existing words - as in lovefest, poptastic, and blogosphere.

She sees technology as one of the most fertile grounds for sources of new language , with this year's entries including going viral, mashups, and podcasts, as well as blook, which is a book serialised on a weblog.

New expressions from the world of business (not many of which seem to me likely to last) include square-headed girlfriend (a computer), delayering (making people redundant), and of course the still most over-used term, rightly satirised in Private Eye, the ubiquitous solutions.

I was glad to note that she brought extraordinary rendition and unlawful combatants under the critical spotlight as the year's political euphemisms, and added another I hadn't seen before - internal nutrition, which means 'forced feeding' to you and me.

The products of online slang dictionaries are as abundant as ever - largely because they invite voluntary contributions. I thought road spanky (liquor consumed in a moving vehicle) was especially vivid, as was bootyshelf (protruding buttocks).

Actually, it's not all looking at the current use of language. She has an interesting chapter on the naming of diseases which looks back to medieval history. There are also short reports on the language of gambling (a growth industry) on dialect (surprisingly, on the increase), and on the language of tabloid headlines.

Every year there's a section on food, where there seems to be an unending urge to more epicurean drama and verbal urgency. Main dishes are seared, smothered, and caramelised rather than simply cooked. Similarly, the flowery use of metaphor and simile in wine commentary continues unabated.

There's even a roundup of misused language - as in a bowl in a china shop, putting the cat before the horse, and going at it hammer and thongs. She has statistical evidence to support the notion that these are becoming more common, but one hopes they will not become acceptable - except for purposes of irony.