Omnishambles beats off mummy-porn, becomes English word of 2012
The UK's new word of 2012 is "omnishambles", according to the Oxford English Dictionary's compilers. Selected from a list of several new words added to the gold-standard dictionary this year, omnishambles was chosen by lexicographers at Oxford University Press because it best reflects the mood of the past 12 months. It was first …
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Unecessary ...
... except as a bowdlerism of clusterfuck
GIF ?
Everyone uses PNG now don't they ?
If its taken GIF this long to make the OED - how long will that take for PNG make it into the OED ?
Re: GIF ?
blame tumblr for the resurgence in the (animated) GIF
Re: GIF ?
Its about the animations. It says something rather depressing about the state of video on the web, that we're still using animgifs after all these years.
Re: GIF ?
Not really, the entire point is the restrictions, to an extent. Some people glory in how jarring and ghetto it is, some make it loop in really clever ways. Some actually do really subtle stuff with them, too. Have a look at:
http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/
It's a thing. Often the people who do it are quite capable of editing in full HD and outputting to h.264 if they want to, but that's not the point :)
Re: GIF ?
These may just be the best SFW animated GIFs ever. Have an internet, good sir.
Re: GIF ?
"blame tumblr for the resurgence in the (animated) GIF"
They never went away, tumblr users have just discovered how to make them which means the mainstream media thinks they've just been recently invented.
Will they be citing examples....
BBC for example (Jimmy Savile, Newsnight, Secret 28)
The UK's new word of 2012 is ...
a word that perfectly describes the current state of the UK
'the verb "medal" (from the Olympics)'
Am I the only one to experience tightness of chest and breathing difficulty when reading that?
Getting that one in the dictionary would be a Big Ask.
Re: 'the verb "medal" (from the Olympics)'
Me too John. It should be 'medalise', obviously.
Re: 'the verb "medal" (from the Olympics)'
Heaven forfend that "to medal" ever becomes accepted usage. Every time I hear it I think they mean "to meddle" and that it's yet another update on the Jimmy Savile story...
Re: 'the verb "medal" (from the Olympics)'
I think you meant "to pedo"
Re: 'the verb "medal" (from the Olympics)'
Medalificate?
Re: 'the verb "medal" (from the Olympics)'
It seems like a perfectly reasonable usage to me. English has a long and glorious history of verbing nouns ("to google" being the most obvious recent example). Of course, "to medal" could have been adopted to mean "to hit the gold medallist over the head with your silver medal in frustration" but "to win a medal" is probably more useful.
GIF(verb)
I should point out from oxforddictionaries.com Central that the US WOTY was GIF when used as a verb. As in making an animated GIF of something to generate an Internet meme. Use of GIF as a verb is surprisingly rather new, otherwise as a noun it would have a quaint 1980s air to it.
Twaddle
Don't care how many new words they come up with, the be all and end all of words is twaddle, best word ever.
Omnishambles? Not even a contender. If you really do wish to appear to be a management type you could always bastardize twaddle into omnitwaddle but you'd only show yourself up.
Bollocks (omnibollocks)
Bollocks (As in my suggestion for the best word ever, not your comment)
And by the same token - omnibollocks
Examples. "The testimony give by the BBC executive at the inquiry was complete bollocks, adding to the collective omnibollocks provided by the BBC in general."
Has...
..."twunt" made it into the OED yet? Might be defined as a contraction of the words "Velvin" and ... sorry, my memory for names is in an omnishambolic state.
Perhaps it's also worth noting that WOTY nominees are not necessarily in the OED or any other Oxford dictionary, nor are they guaranteed inclusion. They are simply words that the editors and lexicographers feel express something of the year's zeitgeist.
I'd never even heard of 'omnishambles' until the Reg bought it to my attention. I feel slightly out of touch yet at the same time not at all disappointed that I missed this particular tedious neologism.
"hadn't heard of omnishambles"
Wot?! Now for punishment, see all episodes of The Thick of It from series one.
What, no YUROPOOR?
Even though the sound of crashing Ponzis and bailouts is everywhere?
WRONG
Their definition of mummy-porn is wrong - I should know as I am very much into Egyptian bondage methods.
Re: WRONG
Totally agree - wrong definition.
Being from birmingham (and this is no doubt true of other areas of the UK, and indeed all of the US) the word mummy refers exclusively to a dead body wrapped in bandages...so an example of mummy-porn would be "Neff-a-titty monthly", "suck my ram-eses" or even "tit-and-cum-on weekly". Mommy-porn on the other hand...different thing all together (not literally 'on the other hand'..before you get any ideas)
The Bugle Podcast has come up with some pretty special ones this year
Fuckeulogy is my favourite by far-
Definition from the Urban Dictionary:
A derogatory oration or writing, especially in dishonor of one deceased.
"This is not so much a tribute episode to bin Laden as a special fuckeulogy to the big man."
- John Oliver, The Bugle, Episode 152.
Re: There is only one deserving 'new' word
Nothing new about embuggerance. It;'s been around for 60 odd years.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-emb1.htm
Mummy Porn
Prefer to refer to it as mumble - concatenation of Mummy Grumble.
It's a weird thing - Cant imaging ASDA or Tescos been stacked with copies of Fanny Hill somehow, but porn for birds is OK
Re: Mummy Porn
Problem with "mumble" is that it's already taken; "mumblecore" is already a (noiseous) music genre.
YOLO
I'm currently in Yolo County, California - gives the name a whole new meaning!
Next year's word will be....
Compuserve
Well, if GIF can make it.....
GIF is not Graphics Interchange Format...
Everybody knows that GIF stands for "Girls In Files".
"To Medal" - only slightly less offensive than "Winningest"...
...which is still used day-in and day-out in the US
Re: "To Medal" - only slightly less offensive than "Winningest"...
I always assumed that winningest was used in a tongue-in-cheek fashion rather than seriously and therefore always makes me chuckle when I hear it. To "medal" on the other hand is extremely irritating. During the summer I heard more than one pundit on the BBC use the word podium as a verb. "I'm fully expecting her to podium this time round". Now perhaps that's a completely justifiable way of using the word podium but - to me - it just sounds plain wrong.
Re: "To Medal" - only slightly less offensive than "Winningest"...
Sadly not.
I think it raised its head during the Olympics when an American commentator used it to describe Michael Phelps having won more gold medals than any other Olympian. At the time it seemed to be laughed off by Sue Barker et al as poor grammar on the part of the commentator, rather than an accepted word.
As a watcher of various American sports however, I can attest to the fact that its usage is wide-ranging and frequent to describe 'those who have won more <games> <championship> <etc> than others'.
(occasionally you can detect a slight cringe in the voices of the better educated commentators who realise that it isn't good English, but they use it as it is well understood in the US)
Re: "To Medal" - only slightly less offensive than "Winningest"...
Everyone knows that's wrong. it should be medalise; as in:
He medalised the hell out of the olympics this year.
Try Greek rather than Latin...
... how about panshambles? Although I think shambles is 15c English anyway.
Looking forward to....
next years WOTY - could it be one that describes an omnishambles of an election campaign - Romneyshambles anyone?
And so the bastardisation of the English language continues
I am all for new words and the natural evolution of language but I believe that any addition to the OED should have been in regular use for at least 5 years before inclusion. Omnishambles is just the "word of the year". Nobody will remember it at this time next year. Clusterfuck has been around since the 70s and ranks up there with the 1940's military favourite SNAFU. Words like omnishambles are spawned by management types desperate to sound intelligent when in fact they end up sounding just as stupid as your local yoof wiv 'iz gangspeek init. They think that adding -ise to anything makes it a verb, so to follow their example I would like to propose the word "Mangleise" - to change or invent a word such as to make yourself seem trendy and with it.
Why I think GIF hasn't died
I think the recent resurgence in GIF popularity is due to the increased connection speeds allowing animated GIFs of a few megabytes to load in a couple of seconds. It suddenly is possible to post them on image boards and blogs without people having to invest time waiting for it to load. If you don't have to wait then suddenly the stuff you are willing to check out increases.
I can recall being on a very slow connection a few years ago, where every click was carefully thought out because after a 2 min wait for a website to load, it better be worth seeing. Now I click all over the place, pages load instantly, and if I'm not interested I close it.
The lack of a viable alternative also helps keep the outdated GIF going. Even if an alternative IS made (MPNG/APNG?) browser support would lead the older format to persist for a long time (also known as the IE effect).
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