embubbled

A correspondent presented me with this word, commenting that he liked it but there were not many instances of its use — yet.  I’m not talking about the rather quaint use of embubbled to mean ‘feeling the euphoria that follows drinking champagne’ but rather the embubbled that means ‘restricted to a group which shares enthusiasms and information to the exclusion of everything else’.

I see a use for it in describing how people sometimes react so badly to new words that they don’t recognise.  Unfortunately we are all embubbled and this embubblement shrinks as we grow older, so that we overreact to random messages from beyond the bubble.

The news that gendy neuch (slang for gender neutral) is even being considered for inclusion in Macquarie Dictionary sent Twitter into a frenzy. An outraged bubble on social media is not something that you want to encounter.  Each individual tweet confirms and amplifies what was said before until the whole group is shouting the same opinion.  It is almost impossible to penetrate such a bubble with facts.  Gendy neuch is part of a small set of words which have been sent to the dictionary and which are up for consideration.  Some may stay, some may go as part of that process.

The isolationism of the bubble has prompted some people to comment that embubblement is fracturing our society and affecting our democracy — badly.  The Canberra bubble is the disparaging name given to the politicians, bureaucrats and attendant media who spend their lives in Canberra and have no access to the cares and concerns of the rest of the country.  Their embubblement has political consequences.