Youthquake' wasn't an entirely predictable choice for Oxford's Word of 2017. It hasn't been on the lips of an entire nation, nor is it new. But it amply fulfilled the criteria Oxford requires for selection.
English may be the fastest moving language in the world, but there are plenty of concepts, sensations and everyday occurrences which lack a pithy word to describe them. Take the clunkiness of 'the day before yesterday' and 'the day after tomorrow': German provides single words for both.
The term 'psychological thriller' is an elastic one these days, tagged liberally on to any story of suspense that explores motivations while keeping blood and chainsaws to a minimum.
In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.
Among the best of Hitchcock's own psychological thrillers is 'Spellbound,' whose story unusually wrapped the subject of psychoanalysis around a murder mystery.
I love both garlic and onions, and this word pithily captures the rich tastes of both.
Claggy is often seen as a negative word, yet for me it describes perfectly that full-mouthed feel of a treacle tart of banoffee pie.
If you eat foie gras, I would really urge you to look at the practice that goes in to producing it. It is totally barbaric and involves force-feeding on the most horrific scale imaginable.
Every sport, every profession, every group united by a single passion draws on a lexicon that is uniquely theirs, and theirs for a reason.
I've been a worrier for as long as I can remember.
When I was growing up, I worried that people would dismiss me as a boring swot because I always had my nose in a vocabulary book - usually in French or German.
My work, my love of words, became my refuge, both when I was working on bilingual dictionaries for Oxford University Press and then via my involvement with 'Countdown' - and now 'Catsdown,' as I call it.
I'm a work in progress. I've started doing spin classes, which always clears my head.
Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.
The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.
Slang has always moved this way. From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they're tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out.
One of the things I noticed is that if you look up the word ambition you will see that when it's applied to women, it's almost always negative. If a woman is ambitious she's cutthroat, she's seen as more unpleasant. Whereas when its attached to a man it's far less negative.
If we want to change the nuance of a particular word we have to change that ourselves.
Slang has different functions: many of the words we use are playful and a lot are tribal - we speak the same way as the groups we are part of. A great deal are also euphemistic, so it's no surprise that a third of us are perplexed by their meanings and origins.
Almost half the adult population finds discussing the subject of money difficult. Slang words help us to navigate these conversations by making us feel more comfortable and confident.
