It is that time of the year. Inspired no doubt by Time magazine's brilliant advertising hook, the Man of the Year, various dictionaries and linguistic societies now have their 'Word of the Year'.
Merriam-Webster decided on 'bailout', based on the number of times the word was looked up on its online dictionary.
Global Language Monitor, which tracks words and phrases in the media, said 'change' came first, 'bailout' second and 'Obamamania' third. As for phrases, 'financial tsunami' was top, followed by 'global warming' and 'Yes, We Can'.
The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its editors' choice last month, even before the year was out: 'hypermiling', defined as 'the attempt to maximise gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one's car and one's driving techniques'.
If you never exceed the speed limit, diligently keep your tyres properly inflated, turn off the engine in a jam, remove roof racks or excess baggage in the boot to reduce drag and drive shoeless so as to be able to feel the gas-pedal sensitively, you are a 'hypermiler'.
The choice of the editors of Webster's New World Dictionary was 'overshare', a verb meaning 'to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval'.
Neither choice is particularly inspired. 'Oversharing', far from being a new affliction peculiar to the Internet age, is a rather old fault. We used to call 'oversharers' gossips or bores. They used to sit around in coffee shops divulging excessive personal information; now, they do it on Facebook. What's the difference? Surely, we don't need a neologism to describe what is after all a perennial human failing.
As for 'hypermiling', it is, as The New York Times' William Safire notes, 'news-specific' - and like all nonce words, it has become outdated within a year of its appearance.
'What the vocabulary needs when gas is an astronomical US$4 a gallon is far from the same when the price at the pump falls back to a more earthly US$2.'
Hypermiling will no longer suffice to wean us from the internal combustion engine; when petrol is cheap, being ERPeed might work better.
(The New Oxford seems to have a fondness for 'green' words. Its 2007 choice was 'locavore', the practice of 'using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be brought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives'. Oxford University Press thought the word was significant because it brought together 'eating and ecology in a new way'.
Actually, as in the case with oversharing, locavoring is not particularly new. Homo Sapiens have been locavores for about 95 per cent of their existence on Earth. They weren't importing avocados from Mexico in Mesopotamia, circa 3,000 BC, or in Africa 200,000 years ago.)
Strangely enough, the runners- up in both New Oxford's and Webster's list of top words were better than the winners. Webster's had 'leisure sickness' among its top five selection - 'a purported syndrome, not universally recognised by psychologists, by which some people (typically characterised as workaholics) are more likely to report feeling ill during weekends and vacations than when working'.
And New Oxford had among its finalists 'frugalista' and 'toxic debt'. These are all words that would have fitted the post-Lehman zeitgeist better.
It is obvious why 'toxic debt' would. That is a buzz phrase that, alas, is going to keep buzzing for some time. 'Leisure sickness' seems an apt phrase to describe the enforced leisure of unemployment or under-employment.
And 'frugalista' - 'a person who leads a frugal lifestyle, but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying second-hand, growing own produce, etc' - might actually catch in a way 'hypermiling' and 'locavore' have not.
'Frugalista', as Mr Safire reminds us, plays on - and reverses - 'fashionista', a buzz word of the roaring 1990s. Ista is the Spanish version of the English suffix 'ist' used to denote an adherent of a system (socialist, capitalist), a member of a profession (economist, journalist), a person who uses a particular thing (violinist, cyclist), and so on.
And as for 'frugal', it comes from the Latin frugalis, the root of which, frug means 'fruit'. It was first applied in English to the sparing or economical apportionment of food in the 16th century, when fruits were considered cheap, MrSafire explains, and later became a metaphor to mean 'sparingly supplied, thrifty' in all respects.
Frui, 'enjoy'; fructus, 'enjoyment'; fruitio(n), 'realisation of a plan'; and 'frugal' are all fortuitously and fruitfully linked. What better title can there be than 'frugalista' - an adherent of a system that seeks fructus in the fruition of frugality - to define the moral universe of the new dispensation that is descending on us?
We all have to be frugalistas in our habits. We all have to be frugalistas in our material aspirations. We all have to discover, as our forefathers did, that there is a moral and spiritual connection - not to mention, an economic one too, as we are learning in this crisis - between frugality and fruition.
Happy New Year.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on December 28, 2008.
