It’s the Collins’ Dictionary Word of the Year (WOTY) time again. Just after the autumnal double whammy of Halloween and Bonfire Night it clears its throat and makes its annual announcement before anything non-seasonal is drowned out by the cacophony of Christmas.
This year’s WOTY was ‘single-use’, describing products – often made of plastic – intended for one use only and which can have a damaging effect on the environment. Collins explain that the term has “..seen a four-fold increase since 2013, with news stories and images such as those seen in the BBC’s Blue Planet II steeply raising public awareness of the issue.” A worthy winner, in both senses of the word.
This year’s other shortlisted contenders come from a variety of fields of our shared experience. There are the political (backstop; Gammon), the cultural and ethical (MeToo; whitewash; gaslight; vegan) and those from tech and popular culture (VAR; floss).
There’s another word on the shortlist which for me, as a word nerd, comes from the most interesting category of all. The word is ‘plogging’, which, if you’ve not heard of it, is defined as ‘a recreational activity, originating in Sweden, that combines jogging with picking up litter.’ Resisting the obvious opportunities to poke fun (recreational?) it’s terms like ‘plogging’ that best show us how we use language and how our vocabulary expands and contracts according to our needs.
Look at some of the shortlisted words from years gone by:
2013: Cybernat, phablet, Olinguito
2015: Dadbod
2016: Sharenting
How many of these are still in common use literally only a few years later? They have already fallen into relative obsolescence and, of this year’s contenders, ‘plogging’ is for my money the term most likely to end up going the same way. Dictionary-compilers of the future might be baffled over why we needed a term for the fun pastime of running round the streets frantically grabbing crisp packets like a low-rent, last round of the Crystal Maze, but that’s not to say it doesn’t deserve its place in the shortlist in 2018. The terms that exist in the margins are the ones that can tell us the most – not just about what’s going on in our lives and societies at the time, but how practically and functionally we employ language to meet our demands.
These words and phrases mean something real when they’re coined. Sometimes they last, sometimes they don’t, but they always serve a contemporary purpose as our lexicon flexes and adapts to articulate whatever is preoccupying us at that point. Even if that means that when we look back on the 2018 list in five years’ time we find that ‘plogging’ has proven to be more ‘single-use’ than the plastic…
Richard Ellis Communications 