The Oxford English Dictionary or OED to its friends has delivered its list of new words for October 2019. Each time this happens I try to look through and select a few that I might be able to use in my freelance writing. New words and their progress towards OED acceptance are an interesting phenomenon. I imagine Army like parade grounds with intensive training and harsh comments…

“You’re not on Facebook anymore, this is the Oxford English Dictionary!”

“You think you’re fancy with your itinerant ‘z’? That’s ‘z’ for ‘zero’ mate, so get marching!”

“You want fame? Well fame hurts… And it made it into the OED decades ago!”

There are definitely a few of the new Oxford English Dictionary words that I won’t be using. Despite writing on an eclectic collection of topics, I can’t imagine that ‘ampallang‘ (a type of penis piercing) or ‘cocky’s delight‘ (nothing at all to do with penises) are going to feature with much frequency in either my online or magazine work. Looking through the list, ‘cock’ seems to feature disproportionately from, ‘cockying‘ (farming on a small scale) to ‘cocktailian‘ (complicated but related to expensive drinks and those with enough money to buy them). I shall avoid these newbies because, knowing my luck, I will end up using them in entirely inappropriate contexts. Imagine thinking you are in for a night of passionate love-making only to find yourself shovelling cow pats.

Enough of this ‘arancini‘ (balls), time to stop ‘angsting‘ (now a verb). Friday is the day for Friday thoughts so I have decided to leave you with my ‘amotivational‘ thinkings on five of this year’s new OED word additions…

• ‘spermaceti organ‘ (an organ in the head of a sperm whale that contains a substance that may or may not help the whale to float). I swim a lot and float well so perhaps I already have one of these.

• ‘simplex sentence‘ (a very basic sentence also known as a kernel sentence but not necessarily related to nuts). Confusing examples might include, ‘I am a nut!’ ‘I eat nuts.’ and ‘I am a colonel.’

• ‘Jiggly‘ (something that is wobbling around or shaking). I tend to wobble when I run, and shake when I am cold. I guess that qualifies me for the jiggly club.

• ‘Omnishambles‘ (speaks for itself really). This one is usually related to politics so is probably going to be popular. I can think of a much ruder version.

• ‘Whatevs‘ I am not even going to lower myself to explain this one but if you try to use it with me, you might find all sorts of things wrong with your ‘stuffie‘, ‘hockey‘ and ‘fidcock‘!

Happy word hunting!