These are new words or phrases that have caught my eye. My definition of a new word is one which is not in the Macquarie Dictionary online.
Some words seem to have more significance than others in terms of reflecting changes in the Australian culture, so I will give each word a Zeitgeist rating (ZG) within a range of 1-10.
If you disagree with the rating that I give, please argue your case in the comment field provided.
I would love you to contact me if you have made any new word discoveries of your own.
People have been commenting on amusingly ambiguous headlines for many a decade so I am not sure why one particular example has given the class of such ambiguities a name.
ZG: 5
This is probably one for the wordlovers and language commentators.
Read MoreIn 1996 Paul Kelly wrote a ballad which he called How to Make Gravy. The song is about a man in prison writing to his brother and thinking about Xmas coming up.
ZG: 7
For many people Paul Kelly’s songs have been the background to our lives for some time now, so this one is probably well known.
Read MoreThere is another lit to add to the collection, a genre of novels featuring menopausal women. A variant on this is the crime sub-genre, hot-flush noir.
ZG: 6
The community of book readers is shrinking as the hot-flush lit is catching on, which means it has a small but enthusiastic group of supporters.
Read MoreThis is also called sobriety memoir. I can see no real difference between the two although the recovery memoir perhaps focuses on the the experience of the writer who has personally travelled the road from addiction to recovery, whereas the sobriety memoir gives more weight to the joys and discoveries that come from being sober.
ZG: 4
This is perhaps a subgenre of quit lit.
Read MoreIt began with chick lit in the late 1980s, the jokey name for the romantic fiction that women liked to read. Now we have quit lit which is the genre of writing that focuses on the sober-serious (blogged here last year) and the techniques and practices that allowed them to become so.
ZG: 5
The fashions in writing genres do not touch us all, particularly when it involves doing without alcohol.
Read MoreThere is a mode of improvisation in which you agree with what one player has offered and then expand on it. ‘My hair is on fire’ says one actor. Yes, and it’s catching onto your clothes’ says another, building up the scene and giving the first actor something to work with.
ZG: 5
The leap from the theatre to business contexts has given this expression greater currency.
Read MoreMills and Boon-style romance has always been a big seller but fantasy seems to dominate everything at the moment. So why not combine the two and have romance fantasy, otherwise known as romantasy.
ZG: 4
No doubt romantasy fills a large shelf in the bookshop but it is still a subgenre.
Read MoreThe gesture of dropping the microphone to indicate that the speaker has had the last word originated with rappers and stand-up comedians in the 1980s.
ZG: 7
This is a meme that has yet to run its course as people experiment with dropping things other than mics.
Read MoreThe telenovela remains focused on one storyline. The telenovela runs for one to two years and then it is done.
ZG: 5
Media jargon rather than common knowledge. However if the genre becomes popular it might become more mainstream. We wait to see Las Rosas!
Read MoreThe latest in the set of lit for literature coinages is up lit, short for uplifting literature.
ZG: 5
While the genre may be popular, the name for it is a bit of book industry jargon. Still it is fun to follow these creative naming sequences.
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