The OED announced it’s list of new words this week.
Here are some of them, including a few thoughts of my own:
- chill pill- a notional pill taken to make someone calm down
- chillax- calm down and relax
- bargainous- costing less than is usual or than might be expected; cheap or relatively cheap
I don’t like it when the OED adds words that I cannot use because doing so would make me sound stupid and/or thirteen-years old. These three words fit this category well. They were not meant for fully matured human beings.
- wardrobe malfunction- an instance of a person accidentally exposing an intimate part of their body as a result of an article of clothing slipping out of position
It’s interesting that the person who first popularized this phrase did not actually experience a wardrobe malfunction but had instead underestimated the reaction of viewers to a woman exposing her breasts during a Super Bowl halftime show.
- fussbudget- a fussy person
- vuvuzela- long horn blown by fans at soccer matches
My mother was using fussbudget thirty years ago. How does it take that long for a word like fussbudget to make it into the dictionary when a word like vuvuzela gets in after one World Cup soccer tournament?
- soft skills- personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people
I don’t hold these “skills” in high regard, and as a result, I find their name amusingly appropriate. Soft skills… funny.
Nerf skills would have been even better.
- cool hunter- a person whose job it is to make observations or predictions about new styles and trends
Are you kidding me? Then I’d like to be a cool hunter hunter and eliminate this scourge from the Earth.
- automagically- automatically and in a way that seems ingenious, inexplicable, or magical
- catastrophizing view or present a situation as considerably worse than it actually is
- matchy-matchy- excessively color-coordinated
- frenemy- a person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry
I approve of all these words and like them a lot. I have used all except for catastrophizing, but now that I’m aware of the word, I expect that I’ll be using it a lot. I know a lot of people who make it a habit of catastrophizing for reasons that I never understand.
In fact, I am probably an anti-catastrophizer, preferring to make light of most situations regardless of their severity, which has a tendency to infuriate catastrophizers.
Some people just enjoy problems. They savor them. Bask in their misfortune. I sometimes wonder if they think they are in a television series, and to have a problem-free, drama-free life would be bad for their personal ratings.
