ok
The passive-aggressive cauldron that is WhatsApp this year added reactions and then — shudder — polls to its repertoire: both as bold a way of ending a conversation as possible. Time surely, then, to retire its most organically birthed -ism, deployed whenever someone says sorry ‘for cancelling at the last minute last night. Shall we do drinks next week on Wednesday? You can choose wherever you like!’ It’s the lowercaseness that really rams home the pissed-offness.
NUANCE
And in a former life, ‘context’. If you hear either of these words, stop listening/ reading immediately and run a mile because you are about to be ’splained to. BOMBSHELL It felt like every two minutes this year there was a bombshell documentary/ biography/interview. Lots of these were, obviously, to do with The R***l F****y and, on closer inspection, turned out to be written by people with about as much access to their subjects as said subjects have to reality. It would be lovely if we could at least just turn down the ‘What Wes from Love Island looks like now will shock you’ energy.
THE REAL ME
…and at the other end of the scale, with access to die for, this. ‘Real Me’s all exhibit the same qualities: honest, self-deprecating, remorseful, down to earth, family orientated, eclectic music taste, concerned about refugees and the environment and all that jazz. If you need a reality TV series or a Netflix six-parter to get across the Real You, you are veering quite heavily into oxymoron territory.
EXISTENTIAL CRISIS
It’s just a hangover, babes.
HOLA
Awful, awful overfamiliar email-ism that, in the era of cultural appropriation, should be a cancellable offence. You wouldn’t, for example, say… actually it’s not worth it. ‘INSERT ANY GEN Z-ISM HERE’ Yes, it’s annoying when Meghan Markle/ Dua Lipa/your over-friendly line manager blathers on about manifesting things. But you know what’s more annoying? People who think that it’s the height of sardonic wit to simply put ‘inverted commas’ around literally ‘any’ Gen Z-ism. It isn’t ‘big’ and it isn’t ‘clever’. Try harder and stop being ‘a sneery old twat’. It’s not like Gen Z-isms are hard to take the piss out of, is it?
HASN’T PUT A FOOT WRONG
Only ever used in conjunction with royals. Or rather, just the one royal. The old boss lasted 70 years on the job. The new kid barely made 70 minutes.
NO 1 IN THE PODCAST CHARTS
‘I couldn’t name you one song in the charts,’ moans the Pink Floyd fan in your life. The Pink Floyd fan in your life has got a point. Can you name one song in the charts? (Saying ‘that Ed Sheeran one’ doesn’t count.) No one, except possibly Ed Sheeran, gives a shit about the singles chart. Or any chart for that matter. In 2022 we are post-charts. But that doesn’t stop literally everyone who has a podcast saying they are top of the podcast charts. Nobody knows, nobody cares, nobody checks. Side note: who came up with the convention that the adverts on podcasts should be read out by the people hosting the podcast? It’s like Taylor Swift abruptly stopping a show to say, ‘Is the broadband in your office not holding up? Then…’
EVERYONE IS WELCOME
Terms & conditions apply, both at this World Cup and during any future visits.
THE SCHOOL RUN
Current favourite of celebrities wishing to portray how down to earth they are. Isn’t quite the chore you think it is when you don’t — unlike normal people — have to drop-kick your three-year-old into the playground so you make the (inevitably delayed) rush-hour train into town.
-GATE
Watergate: now that was a gate. Partygate we’ll let slide. But Beergate? Nipplegate? Pittabreadgate? Only one of those is made up and I bet you can’t remember which one.
THE BOYS OF SUMMER
First came The Killers’ ‘Caution’. Then ‘Higher Power’ by Coldplay, followed by Ed Sheeran’s ‘Overpass Graffiti’ and latterly, in 2022, ‘As It Was’, by you-know-who. Please, God: can whichever modern-day soft rocker decides they next need to launch an album find a song to re-write that isn’t Don Henley’s karaoke classic? Or at the very least come up with a line as good as ‘Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac…’
IT’S COMING HOME,
IT’S COMING HOME,
IT’S COMING…
No, it isn’t
