One thing that rarely changes is the collective gasp at new words added to dictionaries every year which each generation seems to take as a signal that the next generation is trying to kill off the English language for good. This year, "skibidi", "tradwife", and "delulu" are among the gems that have made it into the Cambridge Dictionary in a selection many people believe is down to the increasing influence of TikTok. Time has winnowed the arrivistas — “rizz” may have lost some of its edge as often happens when too many people start using it, but “hygge” remains a comfortable reference point, a security blanket for the affluent middle classes — if that demographic tag has not become an oxymoron. As in every significant aspect of life, change is the only constant even if that change is coloured by societies’ aspirations assuming different meanings in different settings. After all, Swifties do not think stan is half of a silent movies’ comedy act. Back in 1926 The Times’s Literary Supplement told its readers that “Mr Fowler in his delightful dictionary… must delight everyone who ever had a thought for language… Mr Fowler is artfully concerned to hold the present and the past in equilibrium…”. His objective was to bring clarity to communications, especially between the offices of government and the kaleidoscope citizenry of a waning empire increasingly indifferent to deference but stirring to the novel idea of independent democracy. Not only did it achieve that, but for many decades Fowler was a sheet anchor in alcohol- and nicotine-drenched newsrooms or lawyers’ chambers. His view of the subtlety and inflection used to convey everything from the price of gilt pigs at a Kenmare fair to a Pius XI encyclical was, to use a word disinterred by the Brexit debacle, sovereign. Fowler was concerned about how words ran together, how well they copulated to create something new, clear, and, if the stars aligned with even a sliver of abandon, created something with a beating heart. There is naturally a certainty about his rulings that suggests he thought innovation and growth distractions. He worried about the engineering of language rather than trying to tame the flamboyance, energy, and sheer joy of its word-by-word evolution. He worried about structure rather than that wonderful word contrived by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins — inscape. How Fowler might have reacted to the beatifications of well-used but moderately left of field words by the Cambridge, Oxford or the Merriam-Webster dictionary might best be left to one of those splendidly introverted summer schools. Nevertheless, he would have been happy if newly minted words were sung in tune and deepened understanding rather than exacerbate the Defcon 1 delulu that has inflicted US president Donald Trump on this sorry world. Delulu, according to the Cambridge Dictionary’s Colin McIntosh, is an abbreviation of delusional and is associated with a post-truth world where personal beliefs have become more important than reality. To confirm that the word is the perfect fit for the end-of-empire reign of The Donald The First, its dictionary entry defines it as “believing things that are not real or true, usually because you choose to”. Amirite? All is change It is, of course, tempting to sneer and imagine ourselves above those Maga ludramans — an Irish contribution sanctified by the Oxford English Dictionary just last year — but remember, it’s not so very long ago that whole communities in this country, the Catholic portion at least, stood together to pray for the conversion of Russia. One man’s, or one tradwife’s, reality is, as ever, another’s delulu. When all the innovations of AI, all the quirks of the metaverse, when all the advances of medicine or science are totted up, our capacity to live together — sometimes anyway — and our ability to adapt remain defining features of humanity. Flexibility remains our saving grace. Evolving vocabulary is a facet of that even if growth within a common language veers off in divergent tangents. The lingua franca — does any dictionary list musty, dying phrases? — of the BBC is far removed from the chop-chop of American political podcasts or Hollywood’s more articulate ventures. The magnificent script — it is by any standard regal — of Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit, the 2010 adaptation of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, is almost Baroque in its richness. Horse opera as grand opera. Maybe the Coen brothers’ indifference to convention freed them to celebrate convention in a way they had not done before. Emma Thompson’s contribution to the script, all of 20 years ago, of Pride and Prejudice hints at a reverence for language that seems faded. Guy Ritchie’s Snatch tipped Mickey O’Neill’s porkpie hat to that tradition too, albeit in a different key. George Bernard Shaw was right when he suggested that “the United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language”. There has been a huge change since Shaw offered that judgement, (A vegetarian, he also thought Stalin a sound man). The age gap, that nebulous definition of varying attitudes, of not keeping up, has been exacerbated by the sharpness of the evolution of the patios of social media. Parents, much less grandparents, are left high and dry by a new Esperanto used by their children and grandchildren. The fluidity, the pertness of text messaging may not require a Rosetta Stone for digital immigrants but then some of today’s generation of octogenarians are not the first to be left behind by the innovations of their successors. It is inevitable that a language used by around 1.5 billion people — English — constantly modifies and upgrades itself. How could it be otherwise? It would be more than delulu to expect the rap songwriters of south Chicago to use the same vocabulary as the nature poets of Ireland’s Atlantic coast. And how very dull it would be if they were not very different even if they have a common objective. That 20% of the world’s population use English ensures that this diversity is, to use a word once commonplace but now wilting under the slings and arrows of fashion, copperfastened. Neologism — a Greek fusion of neos meaning ‘new’, logos meaning ‘word’ — is alive and well and thankfully at the heart of our culture. So too is its opposite, the force that pushes once popular words to the cliff edges of consciousness. Ostler anyone? Irish words Like all behemoths, English generates a self-perpetuating critical mass. Its future is secure but what of a “definitely endangered” language like Irish? Though a mandatory subject in our schools for many decades, Unesco has defined our first language as such. Heavily politicised Irish struggles to retain a toehold in our world. Just as many of us meaninglessly tick the Catholic box when we fill out a census form, something like 1.9 million people claim a degree of proficiency in Irish. And I’m the sugar plum fairy. Nevertheless, efforts to modernise Irish continue. A committee works on translating or creating in the region of 2,000 to 3,000 Irish words every year. How the estimated 78,000 native speakers will keep up seems a challenge though not as challenging as finding a native speaker working in a bar or a restaurant in areas designated as a Gaeltacht. And it is hard not to imagine a meeting of that committee hijacked for the blackest of black comedies by a contemporary Myles na gCopaleen. An Bunachar Náisiúnta Téarmaíochta don Ghaeilge/The National Terminology Database for Irish has worked for just over 20 years. It is managed by the Gaois research group in Dublin City University’s Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, in partnership with Foras na Gaeilge’s An Coiste Téarmaíochta/Terminology Committee. They add each year’s crop of new words. An coróna-bhíoras might be one though that seems a phonetic tug of the forelock more than a creative, empathetic evolution. These new words are added to the official terminology database, which holds around 168,000 bilingual entries. RTÉ reports that anyone can ask that a word be translated into Irish and a committee tries to devise a new term. Gearóid Ó Cleircín from DCU’s Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, who sits on the committee explains: “Basically the requests will come in, the person is generally asked to provide a term in English and then usually a definition as well, explaining the term, or maybe giving an example or two of the term in use in an English text. "Then the terminologists will check the definitions, they might decide it’s not a great definition, and they might try to find a better one themselves, and then they’ll draft what they think would be a decent Irish version.” Those conclusions carry a huge weight of responsibility if Irish is to survive or grow in any meaningful way. TikTok is one of the foundation stones of the post-truth age, it is too often a conduit for the very worst toxins we can muster, but lexicographers tell us that it is also the petri dish for new vocabulary, so in that context it stands very much on the positive side of the balance sheet. It may not be an agent for change but it certainly facilitates it. One person who artfully holds the present and the past in equilibrium is the 2016 Nobel Laureat Bob Dylan. He was, appropriately, honoured for having created new poetic expression. So, to paraphrase him — The Words They Are A Changin’ — and thankfully they always will.