Juste a mot

A look at new words in the language, compiled in conjunction with Chambers Dictionaries.

File this as info-kitsch if you want, but as the resident wordjockey of this station, I strongly suggest you Tulips read this verbal antidote to the Zapper culture. So put down your larynx-wobbler before you're completed monged for here are some expressions to set your electroantennographic redetectors twitching wordwise. Neither a private slanguage nor Desperanto, these are the words of future dictionaries, tonged from Chambers database and ruffle-dried for extra shine.

Glossary:

Desperanto: The confusion of simultaneous translators. Linguistically similar to Eurotunnelese.

electroantennographic redetector: A device invented by Dr Jerrold Meinwold, of Cornell University, to discover the pheromones of the brown-banded cockroach and longhorn beetle.

info-kitsch: some of the more abstruse items - such as coffee-pot contents or lists of a subscriber's T-shirts - to be found on the Internet.

larynx-wobbler: Australian slang for a can of beer, particularly Foster's lager.

monged: lulled by soothing substances (prison slang).

ruffle-dried: "For softer styling, use L'Oreal Tec Ni Brush Smoothing Mousse and ruffle-dry with fingers". One of the many words and expressions introduced by the hairdressing industry. Others include: damp-drying, blast-drying, roller-setting, tonged, barrel pin and gamine crop.

slanguage: a personal code of words and expressions, shared with others.

tonged: see ruffle-dried.

Tulips: One of the acronyms created in the wake of Yuppiedom: Two Used Left-over Insolvent Parents.

word jockey: jockey, originally a diminutive of Jock, a lad, used to be confined to boys on horses. Then, in the 1930s, came soup jockey (slang for a waiter) followed by disc-jockey and car jockey. With the former now generally abbreviated to DJ, the word has been liberated again with recent spottings including camel jockey as a derogatory term for an Arab. Word jockey, however, is our own invention.

wordwise:... and so is this ghastly pseudo-Americanism, we promise not to use it again.

Zapper culture: Our multi-channel-surfing, video-conferencing, techno- activist age.