How our lexicon got enriched in the past decade

As a student of linguistics one was taught that language changes due to assimilation and dissimilation, mergers and splits, syncope and apocope, prothesis and epenthesis … new words are borrowed or invented, the meaning of old words drifts or is redefined, and morphology of the lexicon develops or decays every couple of generations. In the past decade all of the above has happened to our language, and our vocabulary. New words, new meanings, new interpretations, new implications and new understandings have created a new lexicon prompted by new technologies, new social realities, and a new way of living life. And it has happened in a fraction of a generation.

The most interesting additions to our active vocabulary in the last 10 years have come from portmanteau words … blended words … Brexit, bromance, shero, metrosexual, netizen, screenager, frenemy, freemium, emoticon, unfriend, staycation, podcast, athleisure, buzzworthy, upcycle, solopreneur, sexting, adulting, dadbod, dadance, clickbait, hatewatch, sideye, humblebrag, meetcute, photobomb  … it is not that the likes of motel or smog or brunch did not exist previously in our conversational language, but in the 2010-20 decade, marrying parts of multiple words or their phonemes and combining them into a new word became almost a fashion in popular culture. Take “dadbod” mentioned earlier. To the uninitiated, it is slang for a body shape of middle-aged men, usually dads, with a slightly protruding tummy out of an otherwise muscular body which is actually being celebrated these days as sexy!  

Not just that, some new introductions like MeTime are actually profound expressions of how an entire generation wants not just leisure or solitude, but a cocooned personal downtime with zero intrusions. Similarly, bingewatch has become the newest definition of content consumption yes, but also defines the volume and velocity of the viewing.

There is no dearth of blended words in use today … affluenza, bodacious, celebutant, chillax, crunk, liger, mansplaining … in domains that are more sociological … and the likes of  animatronic, bionic, cyborg, mockumentary, docusoap, telethon, and many more that are derived from technology and entertainment. Even chocoholic, fregan and hangry which are related to food. So, anything goes.

The other major trend of the decade just gone by has been the heightened embracing of acronyms … wildly popular ones like BFF, FOMO, FYI, ICYMI, GTG, BRB, IMO, TTYL, TBTF to the more esoteric GOAT (Greatest Of All Times), EGOT (an Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony winner), OOTD (Outfit Of The Day) or the more grounded TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) or 2C2E (Too Complicated To Explain)!

Our recent vocabulary has also been vastly enriched by words like “woke” which made an appearance on the conversation horizon barely a couple of years ago. Now, who or what is “woke”? Well, it is someone who is hyper-aware of current social issues, and news, and is generally politically engaged. More and more brands today, in fact, are seeking a “woke” positioning.

Similarly, another buzz-word of recent times is “swag” … the newgen word for “cool” … a certain bold self-assurance in style, expression and manner which in the old days was nothing but “swagger”!

To think that just 10 years ago, we did not know, or use, words like selfie, ping, poke, tweet, meme, emoji, troll … or did not even know what a hashtag was all about.

Talking of hashtags, #MeToo entered the global consciousness when on October 15, 2017, Alyssa Milano wrote: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write “me too” as a reply to this tweet.” And world began to talk about its experiences, sparking one of the most acrimonious outpourings and shaming in recent history. And #MeToo became the hashtag that showed us how a few words can galvanize and unite people for a cause. The likes of #Egypt and #ArabSpring, #UmbrellaRevolution and #BlackLivesMatter all became words that were pregnant with meaning, and the pennants of revolution. So also, #MAGA (the acronym for Make America Great Again) which became easily the most emblematic political hashtag of the decade, catapulting Donald Trump to the American presidency. 

Language and lexicon, in conclusion, fulfils a number of roles and functions in a changing society. It interprets the whole of our experience, reducing the infinitely varied phenomena of the world around us, as well as the worlds inside us, to a manageable number of classes of occurrences, types of processes, events and actions, classes of objects, people and institutions. In a way it becomes the “social construction of reality” around us. The rapid change that the world has witnessed in the past decade is truly reflected in the massive enhancement of our day-to-day lexicon, and how new actions, new mannerisms, new attitudes, new thinking, new products, and new ideas have all found names, and expressions, that define them and evoke a common understanding of their meanings amongst us all.  

The writer is an advertising and media veteran