Thread: New English words. Are they really used?

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.)

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.