It's all in a word: Check out 2016's newsworthy words

'Zuptas' and 'Asinavalo' captured state conversation - but there were other words for pedants to argue about, writes Sue de Groot

Black Friday

Those who trade in ignorance claimed that the day of hysterical shopping was named after weekly sales of human merchandise in the time of slave trading. This is utter nonsense. The expression, according to an investigation published on myth-busting website Snopes.com, was coined more than a century after the abolition of slavery.

In the early 1960s, reporters in Philadelphia began using "Black Friday" to describe the bad mood of harassed policemen trying to control traffic on the day after Thanksgiving, when workers took the day off to go shopping. Harassed policemen in these parts might call it just another day.

Bless

Kenny Kunene won the hearts of pedants this year when he suggested on TV that we should drop the ecclesiastical talk and call givers and receivers of euphemistic "blessings" what they really are. He used two words starting with "p", which could not be plainer.

The word "bless" goes back to the Proto-Germanic blodison, "to mark with blood", in the sense of animals sacrificed to appease pagan gods. Blessees were lambs to the slaughter.

story_article_left1

Endemic

Some words triumphed in 2016, but endemic had an even worse year than Brangelina. It means "confined to a localised area" but is constantly used in place of "epidemic", which means raging out of control. Corruption is not endemic, it is epidemic, but since endemic itself has become an epidemic, it is probably time to accept that there is nothing to be done about it.

Occupy

William Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2 was first performed in 1600. In it, a prostitute called Doll Tearsheet complains about the abuse of the word "occupy", which she says "was an excellent good word before it was ill sorted".

From the Latin occupare - to seize or possess - "occupy" in Shakespeare's time was slang for "fornicate" and its alliterative synonyms, hence Doll's complaint.

This did not last - perhaps because "occupy off!" takes longer to say than the usual road-rage idioms. But did supporters of the Occupy Luthuli House movement specify which meaning of "occupy" they had in mind?

Post-truth

Oxford Dictionaries, the body that measures the scale of language earthquakes, named this Word of the Year for 2016. That's not an accolade, it simply means it was the new word most used on social networks.

Last year's winner was the tears-of-joy emoticon, which some argued was not a word, but it has become so widely employed in place of "haha, very funny" that it was allowed special dispensation.

In the space of a year we have gone from a world laughing until it cries to an apathetic world that accepts the post-sentient idiocy of "post-truth", a skulking platitude of a word that drapes a cloak of pseudo-respectability over lies and deceit.

Post-truth is defined as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief".

It is often used in the context of strongly emotive claims made by politicians, many of which are, for want of a better word, fibs.

Let's hope next year brings us a better word.

story_article_right2

Trump

Trump the man has Scottish and German ancestry. Trump the word comes from the Old French tromper. In A Historical Grammar of the French Language, published in English translation in 1896, etymologist Auguste Brachet defined tromper as: "Properly to play the horn, alluding to quacks and mountebanks, who attracted the public by blowing a horn, and then cheated them into buying; thence to cheat."

From the verb "trump" came the noun "trumpery", which in the mid-15th century meant deceit or trickery, and in the 16th century took on a second meaning: "Showy but worthless finery."

Woke

MTV, that oracle of social matters, declared "woke" top of its list of teen slang for 2016. It started in a 2008 song by Erykah Badu, who urged those striving for equality to "stay woke", and is now a widespread term for enlightened, culturally aware and open-minded. Being woke is pretty dope.

"Dope", for anyone unwoke, is a word that has travelled a long way from its birthplace. In the early 1800s, dope was a thick sauce or gravy. It was later used to describe liquid opium, then other types of drugs, but for some years dope has been the new cool. Isn't that just so gravy?

Hogarth is taking a break and will be back next year.