At a loss for words...

My boyfriend is a massive fan of making words up, such as ‘deluscious’, y'know how it works, that would be delicious and luscious merged. As a journalist this grates on me and has led to a few arguments, usually on long car journeys. As our battle of words fizzles out he will always end on the defence, “William Shakespeare made words up, if he can do it then so can I.” This is usually met with a frustrated sigh and a mumbled request for silence and a large vanilla latte.

As much as I hate the boy making words up, I hate even more that he *annoyingly* has a point (please don’t tell him I admitted that) it is a past time that has stood strong and I just can’t argue with Shakespeare… well not without that coffee first, anyway. Good old Bill has a lot to answer for, recent new words have derived, not from poets/playwrights or novelists but from popular TV shows, such as C4’s Made in Chelsea, ‘totes’ (read; totally) ITV’s The Only Way Is Essex, ‘jel’ (read: jealous) and MTV’s Geordie Shore, ‘tashin’ on’ (read: kissing). I’d love to be able to shake my head in disgust at “the youth of today” using such slang, but in reality and all honesty, I use it. Daily. *don’t judge*

Luckily though, none of the above mentioned words have actually made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Yet. Give it time. Apparently Dictionary status can be achieved if the word is used enough. The most recent words to worm their way into this historic status are Mankini (read: male swimming cossie as worn by Borat, below)



sexting (read: sexy texting) and jeggings (jean leggings) as well as re-tweeting (read: erm… re-tweeting) An activity used on the latest social media site Twitter, this will in itself bring into play a whole new arena of words, such as tweet, hashtag and trending – all coming to a dictionary near you.

While I understand the Oxford English Dictionary wants to be seen as moving with the times as well as to document the change of our language, must they document some of the most stupid words we’ve come up with to date… though, instead of stupidity, maybe, just maybe it highlights our creativity as a nation, our stupitivity if you will… no?