A word in your year

With apologies for the slight hiatus, I return with news of the UK Word of the Year for 2012 – as chosen by the Oxford English Dictionary (usually Susie Dent and her colleagues). Now, the first thing to notice about this year's winner, omnishambles, as well as all the others that were in the running – Eurogeddon, Mobot, green-on-blue, Games makers, medal or podium (used as verbs) and second screening – is that the name of the award itself is telling. In most cases, these words will mean precisely nothing outside of a specifically UK context.

Omnishambles in particular appears to have emerged victorious despite its incredibly limited usage. Coined in the script of the British TV satire The Thick Of It, the word is defined as:  

'a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations'.

Don't you just love the way the OED doggedly sticks to its -iz spellings, by the way? Anyway, as a British-made show (the US remake was abandoned), users of the word must surely be confined to fans of that show. The term was also used in the UK House of Commons in April 2012 in criticism of the budget, and in a further portmanteau coinage Romneyshambles – betraying one UK perspective on the US presidential election and its now defeated candidate. But in my view, these instances confirm the term's status as a niche word; much more ephemeral than the 12 months that the Word of the Year tag implies.

We should avoid attaching too much significance to what is, by the OED's own admission, a rather subjective epithet. Other neologisms will gradually gain currency and enter the dictionary on account of their widespread usage. The Word of the Year is chosen by a group of lexicographers sat around a table. As such, you could be forgiven for thinking that their choice is an attempt to impose their own interpretation of the zeitgeist on the rest of us. From the point of view of the term's intended meaning, the choice is also a strange one. Was 2012 really so bad?

If so, then surely Eurogeddon should be at the top of the pile, as uncertainty in the UK and Europe continues the longer the EU crisis persists. Choosing a word used to define anything at the extremes of human expression also means that word will quickly become moribund. If a greater catastrophe occurs next week, then we quickly have to find a new term to signify this latest nadir. Omnishambles will no longer be up to the job. This is exactly what happens with slang and youth language – where existing terms quickly lose their function as identity markers or intensity markers and are superseded by new terms. Just think of all the mild profanities that are now commonplace but would, at the very least, have earned you a clip round the ear in decades gone by!