As we think about the months that have passed, for many of us the memories may be bittersweet. Many may even define the year, well, as a little feral mainly due to negative monumental impacts from extreme weather events, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and the like.
In fact, sometimes life get so weird that we literally need to invent new words to describe it. Every so often great social changes do bring great linguistic changes as well, and we witness it now as we grapple, around the world, with rendering the crisis times into language.
We remember how Brexit led to a flowering of new words, including the inevitable ‘Bremain’ or ‘Bregret’. Again the last two years have seen a variety of words, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2021, we found new words and ideas associated with the crisis increasing at a very rapid pace. Some of them were prominent in the language, qualifying for entry in record time, while others had previously been scheduled for entry in the near future.
Leave alone terms such as 'self-isolating', 'pandemic', 'quarantine' or 'lockdown' that had increased use, epidemiological terms, like 'doomscrolling' referring to obsessively scanning social media and websites for bad news or Covidiot'' for person failing to observe regulations or guidelines designed to prevent the spread of disease, or 'coronials’ for babies born or conceived during the pandemic were widely used.
We cannot forget the debate over the Oxford Dictionary’s 2021 word of the year – vaccine, and how the promising medical solution to the Covid-19 pandemic became a source of division because of its reported personal choice, political affiliation, professional regulations, school safety, healthcare inequality, and so much more.
For 2022, the Oxford English Dictionary chose the term 'goblin mode' as the word after a public vote for the first time in its history. 'Goblin mode' is a slang term used to describe a type of behaviour, which is “unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.”
At the same time, American dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster declared 'gaslighting' as the word of the year for 2022 with the meaning "psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories".
While the scope of lexical innovation in relation to coronavirus is unprecedented, we only need to look to other periods of history to see how such linguistic creativity manifests itself in times of serious social crisis.
A Guardian article a few years back pointed out that English speakers are adding new words at the rate of around 1,000 a year despite the million or so words they already have at their disposal.
The Global Language Monitor estimates that in the modern world a new word is created every 98 minutes. Each year, an estimated 800 to 1,000 new words are added to English language dictionaries.
According to it, more than 90,000 words have been added in the 20th century alone. It is believed that when many people use a word in the same way, over a long enough period of time, that word becomes eligible for inclusion!
Editors of the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, to be completed by 2037, estimate that the rate of inclusion of new words into it will be about 4,000 per year. In 2014, the Dictionary added more than 2,500 new words.
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