This weekend the festival announced its word of the year:
attachiant(e) – someone you cannot live with but cannot live without. A combination of attachant (captivating, endearing) and the slang word chiant (bloody nuisance).
Second was aigriculteur - a farmer unhappy with his lot in life. A combination of agriculteur (farmer) with aigri (embittered) and with just a hint of aïe! (French for ouch!).
I took this photo last week on the outskirts of London
Other words the festival has thrown up are bête seller, describing a particularly awful literary work that becomes an instant hit, the timely eurogner – euro plus rogner (to cut down) – to suggest making savings in the euro zone, and a verb, textoter (to write SMS messages on a mobile telephone), to compliment last year's winner, a phonard – a pejorative term for someone who is glued to their mobile phone.Canary Wharf, London. The natural habitat of phonards
Even though I have read a number of bête seller in the past, the only one of these words I can imagine I will use with any frequency is phonard, but it's good to know the other words are available, just in case.Simon
3 comments:
I'm not very excited about attachiant, aigriculteur and eurogner. Bête-seller [with an hyphen] is not bad and may be useful as a pun. But I do like textoter and phonard. These last two words define some new trends that didn't have words for them.
Back to bête-seller. Everybody knows a bête is an animal and seller as a French word and pronounced likewise means to saddle. Is there a play on the words here?
Lovely pics, quite a contrast!
Gaynor. Just out of shot (to the left) of the first photo is a sign saying that on a clear day you can see Canary Wharf. It was foggy. Fog can be good :¬)
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