What’s Words Worth?

Christmas must be approaching faster than Roadrunner using an Acme jetpack, book companies gear up their marketing and awards are doled out to soon to be forgotten cultural ephemera. Oxford Dictionaries have looked at all the words new to them, used an arcane process (I suspect Google) and elected vape as their Word of the Year (WOTY).

The criteria? “The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a word, or expression, that we can see has attracted a great deal of interest during the year to date. Every year, candidates for Word of the Year are debated and one is eventually chosen that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.”

A quick go on an Internet search engine pulls up 1,830,000 results. This may be 40 times less than the number of references to Jesus but it now ranks up there with wind farm, above Motörhead and around four times more popular than TOWIE. I’m amazed at the lack of interest in TOWIE given the on-going troubles with Dan Osborne and Jacqueline Jossa’s relationship. Apparently.

Whoever they are?

Oxford Dictionaries scan approximately 150,000,000 English words in current use every month and monitor new and emerging ones, tracking frequency of use among other things. It doesn’t matter that the word might have come into use some time ago; it is how noticeable and prominent it has become over 2014 that marked vape out as a contender.

Vape fought off stiff competition from budtender, normcore and slacktivism. Previous winners include chav, bovvered, simples and omnishambles – truly great company.

They say: “As e-cigarettes (or e-cigs) have become much more common, so vape has grown significantly in popularity. You are thirty times more likely to come across the word vape than you were two years ago, and usage has more than doubled in the past year.

Usage of vape peaked in April 2014 – as the graph below indicates – around the time that the UK’s first ‘vape café’ (The Vape Lab in Shoreditch, London) opened its doors, and protests were held in response to New York City banning indoor vaping. In the same month, the issue of vaping was debated by The Washington Post, the BBC, and the British newspaper The Telegraph, amongst others.”

So, slap on Queen’s ‘We are the champions’, pop the corks on the bubbly and vape like the winner you are.