Estuary

Words based on locations don't become part of the general language very often. You do get a few - I mean people talk about "Whitehall" meaning the government, or "the White House" in America, meaning the American government, but not very often, and certainly part of a river - 'estuary'! I think that's a first; I don't remember hearing that before ever.  Now the estuary in question is the River Thames, and during the 1980s the word estuary came into the language referring to the kind of speech that people are using around the estuary of the River Thames, in places like Essex, in the north of Kent, and it was a new kind of accent: a sort of cross between Cockney and Received Pronunciation.  And if somebody said he speaks estuary, it would mean he speaks this kind of mixed accent. In RP, in Received Pronunciation, you'd say that the word was 'wall' - the thing that holds a house up - a wall; in Cockney of course it's a 'wall', a 'wall' and in estuary English of course it's a sort of mixture of the two: a 'wall', a 'wall', with a 'l' sort of sound. It's one of the fastest moving accents of modern times.

Wired

To be wired. Well, if you're talking about electricity that's not surprising I suppose, wires join electrical things. But people being wired? If I say to you "are you wired?" or you say to me, "yes, you're wired"? It's another one of those descriptive words that came in in the 1990s, based on technology.  It really was referring to the I.T. world, the world where computers connect to the internet, and because your computer was now wired in through a cable into a telephone line, people were said to be 'wired' meaning you are connected to the internet.  And so after a while it developed a figurative use. People would say, you know, "are you wired?" and what they would mean is, are you ready to handle this, can you talk to me in a reasonably efficient way? Or if say "Jane is wired" it means "oh, Jane can cope with anything, she?s able to handle all the things that I might throw at her, and her at me".  Actually, all this is history now: in the last year or so, "wired" has been replaced very largely by "wireless" as the coolest term to use around, because "wireless fidelity technology", or "wi-fi" as it's called, w-i hyphen f-i, "wi-fi technology" is now in. Wireless is replacing wired. Now I say, "are you wireless?" meaning "are you ready for me?" I expect that'll be said in the near future. It hasn't happened yet, but it will!

Hotdesking

You know, there are some very descriptive words that come into the language from time to time, and one of the ones that came in the 1990s which really hit me between the eyes when I first heard it, was this phrase "hotdesking".  In fact to begin with, I didn't really know what it meant, and after a while of course, it's become perfectly commonplace now, it's the practice of sharing desks or workstations between office workers, on a sort of rota system. People don't have individual desks, it saves time, it saves resources. The implication of course, that's why the word became so effective, is that it's the high degree of activity that is making the desk 'heat up' as it were: imagine the steam coming off the desk!  Well, it's a noun, "hotdesking", but I've also heard it as a verb: "we're hotdesking tomorrow", "Shall I hotdesk with you?", you might say to somebody. And now of course there are all sorts of derivatives that've come into being: the people who do the "hotdesking" are called "hotdeskers".

Phwoar

Interjections are words which express emotions and some of them are very old: words like 'cooer', 'gosh' or 'phew'. You don't get new interjections very often, but one did arrive in the 1980s. It was a sort of expression of enthusiastic desire - usually by a man about a woman.  Easy to say 'phwoar!' like that - less easy to write. How do you spell such a thing? All interjections have this kind of problem. Well, I've seen it spelled f-o-o-o-a-r for instance ...all sorts of things beginning with f. But the one that is most widely used these days is p-h-w-o-a-r: 'phwoar!' like that.  Well it's becoming very frequent, in all kinds of television programmes I've heard it used recently. Interestingly, although it was originally a male noise, it's now being used by women. Women are using it back to the men. 'Phwoar' these days could be a man looking at a woman in an enthusiastic way, or a woman looking at a man in an enthusiastic way. Nobody's ever said it to me; I just can't be an object of enthusiastic desire I suppose? 

Mwah!

You've seen it on television, or in the street, hundreds of times, thousands of times. Two people come towards each other, they obviously know each other very well, and they start to kiss each other - but it's not a full frontal kiss. No, what happens, one person puts the cheek against the other person's cheek and they have what is often called an 'air' kiss. They make a kissing noise, which shows that they're coming together, as great intimates, but it's not a real kiss at all. And many people then give this air kiss a noise, a word, and it's usually 'mwah', 'mwah' - something like that.  Now, how do you write it? Well nobody knows quite how to write it, but it's really m-w-a-h. I saw it written in about the mid-nineties for the first time. And, there's a plural too: "there's lots of mwahs about these days" I remember reading in somebody's journal at one point. It's an affectation, it's associated with a social elite - probably everybody does it to a degree or another.  What's unusual is to get the effect coming out as a word. It's a sort of 'sound symbolic' word - mwah - it's a lovely way of expressing the actual noise that takes place when you do a phoney kiss of this kind. And I've never done it myself - I'm not a 'mwah' type person - but I think an awful lot of people are. I certainly don't think I've ever heard it on the radio, and certainly not as a way of saying goodbye to listeners - but I'll try it out and see what happens, so 'mwah'!! 

e -

In a vote, in 1998, the American Dialect Society looked for "the new word that was most likely to succeed." And they had an accolade - "the word of the year". And that particular year, it wasn't a word at all, it was 'e-', e hyphen, the prefix, meaning electronic of course, as you'll find it in e-mail for instance, these days, a lot.  Well, why did they think it was going to be such a successful development? Well because in the mid-1990s they had noticed, the American Dialect Society had noticed how many people were starting to use this e- prefix and applying it to all kinds of circumstances. And in the 1990s you got all these developments: e-books (electronic books); e-voting (electronic voting); you could get a loan from a company by e-mail, and it would be an e-loan. There were e-newsletters, e-securities, e-shopping, hundreds more.  And people after a while began to play with the word - you will have heard this too: you know about retail and retailing. Well now you can have e-tail and e-tailing, because that's retail shopping over the internet.  And of course it didn't take long before people started to complain about the way in which it was over-used. In fact a couple of years later, one of the big internet magazines said "this is a word, this is a prefix that has to go! Everybody is using it too much." Well, it hasn't gone - it's here to stay. E-speak is the future! 

Dis(s)

Prefixes, almost by definition, don't occur as separate words. I mean, that's what they're for: they're for modifying a word, occurring before a word, and making it change its meaning - happy, un-happy, national, de-nationalise and all this sort of thing. They don't normally occur as words on their own. But occasionally they do.  You've perhaps heard 'anti' - he's very 'anti' something, a-n-t-i. Or he's very 'pro' something -- well they're prefixes which have suddenly become different words. Now they've been around a long time. A recent one, an absolutely fascinating one, is this prefix 'dis': d-i-s, or sometimes d-i-s-s. It's from the word 'disrespect', to show disrespect to somebody, from the noun, by insulting language, or insulting behaviour. It means basically to put somebody down.  It's American, black English slang really, and it's been around since about 1980. And what's happened, it's come to be used as a full verb. You can say now 'I dissed him' - to diss, I dissed him - or 'stop dissing her'. And that's the interesting thing, that it's the prefix that's become the verb! It's a most remarkable development. 

Text

'Text' is one of these new words that have come into English as a result of the internet revolution and especially, this time, the cell phone revolution. Cell phones didn't exist well, 5, 10 years ago, they weren't around and as soon as they came along, people started using them to send messages to each other. So, first as a noun, you had the noun 'text' and now you have the verb 'to text', which is to send a written message using a mobile phone or a cell phone if you use that expression instead.  It isn't new actually. Although the verb 'to text' is a modern feature of today's English, you can actually trace it back to the 16th century when 'to text', in those days, was to write something in very large letters, in capital letters, in 'text hand'. And, if you look it up in a big dictionary these days, you'll often be told "this verbal use is now rather rare". Well it was rare until about 4 or 5 years ago. Since then of course, everybody's been using it, and it's produced a whole new family of words.  You can now 'text' somebody of course, but you can be engaged in the noun 'texting'. And then you've got 'text messaging' which is a fuller form of the idea of texting somebody. And the people who send messages to each other are called 'texters', and the whole language of abbreviated communication that you can use - introducing abbreviated forms into your text message, in order to make it as succinct and as quick to send as possible. Well, what's the name for that? There isn't an agreed name at the moment - but I call it 'text speak'.