Thread: New English words. Are they really used?

Hello

Was reading about new English words that appearing nowadays. Maybe people who are learning English would be interested to know. And I would like to know whether these words are really used by native speakers?

here are some words:

Screenager - A young person or teenager who spends a lot of time in front of the computer screen.

Trashion - Blend of 'trash' and 'fashion'. Fashionable items created from old, used and recycled elements.

Textual harassment - Sending text messages to mobile phones which insult or abuse people.

Sofalise/sofalize - Stay home and use the internet, phone or other electronic device to communicate with people (social networking, chatting, tweeting, etc.), rather than go out and meet them face to face.

Recessionista - Popular new term for a person who succeeds in dressing stylishly a tight budget.

Password fatigue - Being tired of having to remember a large number of passwords for different electronic devises.

Noogler - New Google employee.

Netizen - Blend of 'internet' and 'citizen'. A person who spends an excessive amount of time on the internet.

Netiquette - Blend of 'network' and 'etiquette'. Set of rules governing appropriate behaviour and courtesy on the
internet.

Gastrosexuals - A new generation of men who see cooking more as a hobby than a household chore, and use their cooking skills to impress friends and potential partners

Funemployed/Funemployment - A blend of 'fun' and 'unemployed'. Someone who enjoys not having a job because they have more time for leisure and fun activities.

Freemale - A woman who is happy to stay single and independent so that she can do what she wants when she wants.

Flame war - A period during which angry or rude email messages are exchanged

I have definitely heard "netizen", "netiquette", and especially "flame war", except that it usually refers to an exchange of angry messages on forums / Internet message boards rather than email messages.

I normally live in the UK and I work in IT..... I have not heard any of these words other than Flaming, Netiquette and Netizen. Netizen sounds cheezy though, it is simply an internet user, I believe.

The word "fatigue" could be applied to anything that somebody might be fed up with or tired off. Including remembering lots of different password.

The rest sounds like something a tech journalist has cooked up, that is not used by normal people.

I also have heard and used exactly the same three words as the others.

I have heard of Flaming, Netiquette and Netizen. I have not used them. Wait -- I may have used Flame.

So I asked my teenagers and they had not heard of ANY of them. The only ones they could guess at and get the definitions correct were Textual harassment & Sofalise.

Originally Posted by Hanna

The rest sounds like something a tech journalist has cooked up, that is not used by normal people.

I agree. Journalists often have a bad habit of reporting "new trends" that they hear about from other journalists, who heard about the trend from still other journalists, who heard about the trend from the journalist who made it up!

This is probably harmless if we're talking about "new slang words that teenagers are using"; it's not so harmless if the journalist is reporting about "the growing epidemic of babies born addicted to crack cocaine."

(The "crack-baby epidemic" is one of the more famous examples from US journalism of a non-existent problem that was invented by one journalist and then became an obsession for news media nationwide. Actually, there really was an "epidemic" -- but it wasn't a new problem as a result of "crack" cocaine; it was the same old problem of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome that had existed for decades.)

Flame in the slang sense of "to send/post an angry message electronically" goes back to the late 1980s, if not earlier -- it was used on university-based email and BBS forums before the general public had heard of the Internet, and before the WWW was "created" in 1993.

And Netiquette probably goes back to the mid-1990s, when the general public was first discovering the Internet and Web. However, it never became as popular as flame, which is now universally understood on English-language forums.

All the others on the list are rather useless and excessively "cutesy-poo," in my opinion, and will be quickly forgotten.

Although as Hanna explains, "so-and-so fatigue" can be used slangily in lots of different situations to mean that you're bored with "so-and-so."

For example, "I love computer games but I think I'm developing FPS and MORPG * fatigue. I miss the old LucasArts adventure games like Monkey Island!"

And in the context of HIV epidemiology, the phrase condom fatigue has been used to describe the problem that "people have stopped practicing 'safer sex' because they dislike wearing condoms."

Note that condom fatigue does NOT mean that the condoms themselves have become weak and ineffective because of chemical changes in the latex rubber -- although metal fatigue, in the context of engineering and architecture, means that the metal itself has lost its strength.

* FPS = The "first-person shooter" genre of computer games, like Doom and Duke Nukem; MORPG = "multiplayer online role-playing game", like World of Warcraft.