The Internet Book Database of Fiction

'Hip' to 'chav': century of new words

***Some words crash and burn, but others get a new life

By Jane Wardell
London, AP

In 1904, it was "hip." In 2004, it's "chav." In between, there was "tiddly-om-pom-pom," "racism," "cyborg," "punk" and "9-11."

They're all words chosen by a book that charts the creation of new words over the past 100 years.

Author and word lover Susie Dent has delved into the social and politcal concerns of society from 1904 to 2004 to choose a word for each year to provide a snapshot of that 12 months.

Each word in "Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report" made its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in its year of nomination.

Some words provide a distillation of the social or political scene in the given year - "U-Boat" in 1916, "demob" in 1920, "Blitzkrieg" in 1939, "peacenik" in 1963, "Watergate" in 1972, "punk" in 1974, "dot-commer" in 1997 and "9-11" in 2001.

Others surprise at how early they appear - "spliff" in 1936, "mobile phone" in 1945, "Wonderbra" in 1947, "generation X" in 1952 and "cyborg" in 1960.

"If you look at teddy bear 1906 for example, it came about as a result of U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt," Dent said.

"Mobile phone was almost certainly military technology postwar. It disappeared for a while, surfaced for a little bit in the 1960s but there were few users and it didn't explode until the 1970s and 1980s."

Oxford Universtiy Press, which is publishing Dent's book Nov. 19, notes that English is the fastest-moving language in the world, as well as the largest.

"A lot of European countries have language academies that preserve their nature of their languages, but we've never had an academy in English," said Dent.

"There's no single authority saying what you can have and what you can't. I think that's fantastic, because then English just moves as we need it to."

Some words in the list have not stood the test of time - "tiddly-om-pom-pom" in 1909, "lumpenproletariat" in 1924, "beatnik" in 1958 and "beatbox" in 1982.

Many others have, often popping up with renewed meaning decades later - "hip" in 1904, "celeb" in 1913, "ceasefire" in 1918, "racism" in 1935, "fast food" in 1951, "awesome" in 1961.

"For celeb, the first citation was a letter to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and some person writing in from provincial midtown America said 'I'm no celeb, like you,'" said Dent.

As for the latest addition, "chav" is a slightly derogatory term for young men who wear cheap gold jewelry, tracksuits and baseball caps. A mobile phone is never far from their ear.

Dent believes the word was derived from the mid-19th century Roma word "chavi," meaning child, by a popular culture Web site in Britain that used its Gypsy roots to make a statement on the class level of purported chavs.

"I think it's a really horrible word, but it's quite a good example of a word that has burst out on to the scene," she said.

Dent also considers words or terms of the moment that haven't yet made it to the dictionary.

Chief among them is "retrosexual," which predicts a backlash to the suave "metrosexual" man of recent times who uses beauty products and isn't afraid to cry. The scruffy "retrosexual" is a mantasy adventures. A Shroomer is a picker or user of wild mushrooms, often of the hallucinogenic variety.

Evaine wrote:Surely it would be LUMPENPROLETARIAN?

Algot Runeman wrote: My father, at age 80, read mostly from two things: The unabridged Webster dictionary and the World Book Encyclopedia.