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Wardrobe malfunction, strippergate among the year's new words 15/12/2004 5:29:00 PM
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TORONTO (CP) - This was the year of the wardrobe malfunction, a televised breast-baring event of such phenomenal interest that everyone talked about it - and the English-language was enriched by it.

It was also the year of bird flu and phishing and strippergate, all bad things, agrees Katherine Barber, editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

"They're pretty depressing," says Barber of most words that entered the vocabulary or "leapt to the forefront" in 2004.

That is not surprising given the fact that new words are spread by the media, which have a predilection for bad news, she said Wednesday.

"I'm sure there are all sorts of wonderful discoveries in the health field that will make great differences to people but didn't make the headlines quite so much as bird flu."

Janet Jackson's brief breast exposure at the Super Bowl "created such a big brouhaha," says Barber, explaining why the term wardrobe malfunction caught on in general parlance.

"And also I think a lot of people just thought it was funny. It seized people's imaginations because of it's being euphemistic."

She adds it became a "classic vogue word," with ordinary people applying it to their own clothing mishaps. But Barber is not convinced it has staying power.

"We see words like that all the time every year. ... They're very popular for six months and then you never hear of them again. Unless there's a real need in the language for a word to designate something, then the word won't stick around. So we'll see."

Phishing arrived in the cyber world, always a rich source of new terminology. It's a type of spam whereby e-mails from seemingly legitimate businesses entice computer users to divulge personal information.

And political scandal was represented by strippergate, referring to the commotion over a temporary residence permit given by Immigration Minister Judy Sgro to a Romanian exotic dancer who had worked on her election campaign.

Other notable new words of 2004 identified by the Canadian Oxford Dictionary team in Toronto:

-Gas and dash: Drivers filling up at self-serve gas bars and leaving without paying - a phenomenon brought on by the skyrocketing price of gasoline.

-Clostridium difficile: A superbug that hit hospitals, especially in Quebec.

-Celebrity justice: With an increasing number of celebrities having run-ins with the law, the term has become a part of the language.

-Nearshoring: As U.S. high tech firms lost jobs to offshore companies in Asia, some Canadian firms offered themselves as "nearshore" alternatives.

-MOOTWA: An acronym for Military Operations Other Than War, from the book The Ghosts of Medak Pocket, about Canadian peacekeepers.

-Orange Revolution: Supporters of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yuschenko turned out en masse bedecked in orange.

-Janjaweed: Pro-government Sudanese Arab militias.

Bird flu made it into the latest Oxford, published in June. The dictionary's editors will wait to see whether the other words remain in use before deciding whether to include them in a revised edition.

Labels: colloquialisms, dictionary, modern lexicon, street slang, vernacular

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