Words of an Odd Year

At this time of year, dictionaries announce their Words of the Year. It’s a bit of a publicity exercise, to be honest, and not something to set too much store by, but still fun to see what gets chosen. This year’s selections have been a bit of a mixed bag and many of them have left me thinking “hmm, odd choice” - but then maybe that appropriately reflects what an odd, discombobulating sort of year it’s been.

WOTY

Different dictionary publishers use different criteria to choose their Words of the Year, some of which are clearly stated, some less so. Cambridge’s choice is based (largely) on the most popular word that people have looked up on their dictionary website and this year was announced as perseverance - which at first sight seems an odd choice. It’s popularity was linked to the NASA Mars rover called Perseverance that landed back in February. It saw a huge spike in lookups, likely from two sources - English learners who wanted to know what the word meant and also L1 English speakers who wanted to check the spelling. To me, it feels like a slightly odd choice, regardless of the stats, just because it refers to such a specific moment, quite early in the year, but I guess it does also chime with the perseverance we’ve all had to demonstrate in living through a second year with Covid.

Collins, on the other hand, have gone down the new coinages route, choosing novel words and terms that have appeared, or at least gained a foothold, this year. Their shortlist was topped by NFT or non-fungible token - yes, exactly, neither do I! Again, it feels a slightly left-field choice, but their shortlist more generally does reflect some of the themes of the year with several tech-related words (NFT, metaverse and crypto), some pandemic words (double-vaxxed, pingdemic and hybrid working) and miscellaneous others - as I said, it has been a miscellaneous sort of a year, so maybe that’s appropriate.

Oxford went for perhaps the most obvious choice, vax, with an accompanying report into the language of vaccines. American dictionary, Merriam-Webster also went for vaccine. Probably for many of us, it is the word that best reflects the year, but then it doesn’t provoke much debate, does it, or make you read on to find out why.

I think my favourite WOTY comes from the Australian National Dictionary Centre who plumped for strollout - apparently a term to describe the slow pace of the vaccination rollout in Australia. Yes, it’s one of those gimmicky buzzwords that was probably coined by a headline writer, but it does definitely tell you something about a time and a place.

Words of My Year

From a professional point of view, I’ve worked on a mix of projects this year that have had me delving into different types of vocabulary. I started off the year researching idioms and phrasal verbs for new editions of two books - Work on Your Idioms and Work on Your Phrasal Verbs (both for Collins). We were focusing on the most frequently-used items in each group, so not necessarily touching on low-frequency trending words. However, we did add call out to the unit on Reporting in the media, which I think has proved to be quite key this year, with unacceptable behaviour being called out in all kinds of areas of life. Here are a few key collocates I found from recent corpus data.

Recently, I’ve spent more time than you would think is feasible researching prefixed words for another project. I’m not sure that any of them would be candidates for WOTY, but to continue the ‘odd year’ theme, they’ve definitely sent me off in some peculiar directions, including getting to grips with the philosophical concept behind antirationalism and trying to understand the physics of multipole.

I’ve also spoken about language change - and its relevance to ELT - at a number of events, both this year and last. What struck me when I was putting together my most recent session for TESOL France was the degree to which I needed to update my examples of coronavirus-related vocabulary. Words that had sprung up in the early days of the pandemic when we were all coming to terms with lockdowns - like coronadodging (trying to avoid people on the pavement to maintain social distance) and quarantinis (quarantine cocktails, sometimes shared with friends via Zoom) - already feel quite passé and have instead been replaced by terms that reflect the place of Covid as a mundane reality in our everyday lives - like corona-related and covid-appropriate.

On a more personal note, I think one word I’ve used a lot in 2021 has been hermity - as in, I’m getting quite hermity. (Yes, it’s a made-up word. Apparently, hermitic or hermitical is the adjective from hermit, but doesn’t feel quite the same) After so long staying at home, avoiding crowded places and barely travelling, I’ve definitely got used to a more isolated sort of existence and my re-entry is proving to be a slow one. Although there have been few official restrictions in the UK since the summer, I’ve felt wary about getting back to normal activities and have continued to mostly stay at home - partly out of caution and a sense of social responsibility, but if I’m honest, as much out of habit. I’m still feeling that life is very much 'on pause', so for 2022, I’m hoping that something will prompt me to 'press play' again.

10 ways to tackle coronavocab: #1 Coronacoinages

When I recently asked ELT teachers on Twitter how much their students wanted to talk about the pandemic, I was unsurprised to get a mix of answers. A few said they didn’t want to talk about it at all, some said their students were keen to talk about the situation and they felt it was good to let them get it out. Most were somewhere in-between. Comments included “no more than any other topic” and “it inevitably crops up”.

If you’d like to tackle the topic with your students, over the next 10 mini-posts I'll be suggesting different angles you could take and activities you could try or adapt. You don't need to make a big deal of it, it could just be a quick 10-minute activity. And you might be able to work in some useful ideas about English vocabulary in general too.

Which words to choose?

I'll be suggesting a range of possible vocab items in each post. Please select the words you want to focus on so they're appropriate for your students taking into account their age, level and interests, and don't overload them with all the words in each set. Working through 10 or 12 new words gets boring and repetitive, even for advanced learners, and they really won't remember them. Pick a handful, explore how they're used in context, draw out some general points and just have fun with them.

1 Coronacoinages

One of the more light-hearted effects of the coronavirus pandemic is the way it’s inspired a wave of new coinages, many taking the corona- prefix as a starting point. English is a fabulously creative language when it comes to combining words and parts of words to create new ones and it’s a really useful aspect of language to highlight with students to encourage them to notice how other words are made up of meaningful parts. A greater awareness of morphology can then help learners to decode new, unknown words they come across in future. Remember that these activities aren't about learning these particular words – which will likely (hopefully!) have slipped out of usage in a year's time – it's about noticing word parts and about having fun with English.

Some examples in context:

Take a mini coronacation by driving by these landmarks.

Many of us are on what's been called the coronacoaster, experiencing sudden ups and downs.

The coronacrisis has hit the company hard.

Expert advice before you grab the clippers for that coronacut.

Manipur still remains a corona-free state.

The management said that the park had been made corona-proof.

A local psychologist offers tips to ease anxiety in the coronaverse.

Panic buying saw the country's supermarkets stripped of flour as many turned to isobaking.

Name three things that are helping you get through isolife right now

All it's going to take is one covidiot who will ruin it for everyone else.

It's also a good idea to go over these guidelines with your quaranteam group as well.

In these quarantimes, some of us are missing our access to hairdressers and it SHOWS.

Often, the loudest voices are the ones with misinformation; we're having an infodemic.

New and unfamiliar sights await: hand-sanitizer dispensers scattered on every surface, employees smizing through their face masks.

Activities:

• Pick a handful of new words and get students to guess what they mean by dividing them into their parts.
• Find examples of the words in use (use the examples above or trying googling them) and get students to work out the meaning from context. Images to go with the examples would work well too.

My attempt at 'smizing' - smiling with my eyes when wearing a face mask

• Get students to make up some of their own coronaspeak words to describe phenomena they’ve experienced.

For more about emerging coronaspeak and some useful definitions, check out Tony Thorne's excellent series of blog posts. You'll also find a few of these new coinages already appearing in online learner's dictionaries - Macmillan has 'Open Dictionary' entries for coronacoaster, quarantini and infodemic (among others) and smize appears in several online dictionaries. And for more ideas and activities for teaching vocab generally, take a look at ETpedia Vocabulary: