By Anna Sobell
In no particular order, and with no political agenda, here are Language Services Direct’s favourite words and phrases of 2017!
There’s no denying that 2017 has been an eventful year with plenty of highs and lows along the way, and as the keen linguists that we are here at Language Services Direct, we thought we’d take a look at the British English words and phrases we’ve all been using to express ourselves over the last 12 months.
Following the recent trend of employing a portmanteau to refer to a celebrity couple (Brangelina, Billary and Kimye), foodies have now taken things one step further. The healthy pasta substitute of courgette sliced into ribbons has been christened ‘courgetti’, and we love it! Not quite as much as spaghetti, but hey…
At some point in mid-2017 these popped up and were suddenly everywhere! Handwritten signs in newsagent windows proudly promoting their new stock of fidget spinners to keep up with the seemingly overwhelming demand; forcing us all to question…what they are and where did they come from? Well, the fidget spinner is a small plastic device that you can spin around on your fingers to alleviate stress, boredom and distraction. Simple, addictive and extremely popular; at one point 49 of the 50 best-selling toys on Amazon were fidget spinners or a slightly different version – the fidget cube.
What came first- the millennial or the digital native? The answer is a tricky one, as they tend to be mutually inclusive. A digital native is a person who has lived with the internet and technology being a part of their life from the day they were born. The absolute opposite of anyone who uses their index finger to navigate their smartphone! Digital natives use technology to help in all kinds of ways, see how this can be extended to language training here.
No idea what this means, but it certainly made us all smile.
I’m particularly fond of this little gem of 2017 as it is a Language Services Direct creation! Whilst discussing what the theme should be for our Secret Santa presents, someone suggested a gift to have on our desks in the office; not your standard office stationary fare, but something a little more special or decorative. All of which prompted a colleague of mine to have the impossibly impressive brainwave of coining the term ‘dèskor’! i.e. desk decoration…genius.
Now, to end on a more poetic note, one of my esteemed colleagues decided to swerve the brief, and instead submit some old and forgotten words he’d recently rediscovered, see what you think: the wind soughed in the billowing trees. Their boles would sadly soon be used for palisades.
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