Thursday, January 10, 2008

New words Australian style

According to the BBC news website, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary is running an online vote to decide Australia's word of the year for 2007. As with many of these articles about new words, there's a novelty element to the coverage, with lots of silly words that are hardly ever used making headlines but as always it gives us material to look at for ENA5 and Language Change. And this time there's a little Haribo competition for you, to encourage you to be interactive.

So, some of the words up for nomination are listed below and I'd like you to describe the word formation process/processes (eg blending, affixation, semantic shift, borrowing etc.) at work with each word and post them as comments below. The person with the most correct answers receives a large bag of Haribo.

1. Floordrobe
2. Tanorexia
3. Griefer
4. Kippers
5. Man Flu
6. Baile funk
7. Exergaming
8. Cyberathlete

Useful for:
ENA5 - Contemporary Language Change

Black British English vs MLE

The latest episode of Lexis is out and it features an interview with Ife Thompson about lots of issues connected to Black British English, i...