Welcome to July’s Word to Watch blog, where we look at the new(ish) words that have lately been circulating throughout Australian English and around the world, for better or worse. While any of these words might be considered for Macquarie’s Word of the Year, we sincerely hope that a couple from this month’s list don’t make it that far.
ate (and left no crumbs)
The term ate, especially when combined with a follow up like and left no crumbs, means ‘to have performed something extremely well’. This new sense of the verb eat probably originates in US Black and Latino queer culture in the early 2000s, and is clearly distinct from other figurative meanings conventionally associated with the verb eat, for example this thing eats up the road. One big difference is that the new sense doesn’t require an object. When talking about a car, this thing eats sounds weird, but when talking about a performance, you ate is a normal thing to say, at least for those in the know.
sanewashing
Google sanewashing and a particular name will appear in almost every recent article. But prior to the recent upsurge, sanewashing has been used by people on every side of politics in condemnation of their opponents’ (perceived) practice of presenting radical or potentially dangerous ideas as if they were reasonable, normal, or sane. It joins a number of –washing terms like straightwashing, pinkwashing, sportswashing, or wikiwashing, where the common thread is the removal of unpalatable elements so as to deceive an audience.
bluesnarfing
If you’re like us, reading about bluesnarfing will remind you of how much there is that you don’t know. Firstly, have you heard of snarfing? ‘Eating greedily’, or in the world of computing, ‘copying files over a network without the owner’s permission’. Now, add bluetooth (a kind of wireless technology), and you get something that means ‘using a bluetooth connection to gain unauthorised access to information’. But bluetooth only has a range of a few meters, how do they find me? Well, through wardriving of course, driving around a city with a device which is looking for connections. I live a long way from a city, am I safe? Perhaps not, because now we have bluesniping, long-distance bluesnarfing. What if they only send me things as a kind of prank? That’s merely bluejacking.
redpilled
The idea of the red pill as a metaphor for an awakening to alleged biases in our society is not particularly new, having been borrowed from The Matrix soon after its release in 1999. But it’s come back to our attention because one particular meaning has since become dominant. To be redpilled now usually means to have taken up the beliefs that our society is hostile to the interests of men, due to cultural and political institutions devised by feminists who are constantly working to conceal this from their male victims. Incidentally, a new derogatory sense of redpilled has also emerged, describing people who believe in conspiracy theories about feminism.
bluepilled
Here’s where things get really interesting. Suppose you are of the point of view that there is a real world hiding behind a layer of feminist misinformation, how would you conceptualise the beliefs of people who disagree with you? This is where bluepilled comes in. It’s used to describe people who not only maintain views that contradict yours, but who have allegedly chosen to do so by deliberately sedating themselves to (what you consider to be) concrete evidence of gynocentrism. Subsequently, we’ve seen terms like purplepilled (a position between the two) and blackpilled (redpilled mixed with nihilism), so keep an eye out for those too. As we often see in language, there doesn’t appear to be consistency in the use of hyphens or spaces in these new words.
