This is going to really rile my friend Andrew, who’s been trying to persuade me to include hyphenated words and his own pet hate ‘no problem’ for years. I’ve had to point out to him repeatedly that it’s called Word of the Week, not Words of the Week. And yet what is this word ‘climatechange’?
Only the children’s word of 2023, that’s what! And no, it’s not really one word, but when The Oxford University Press asked 5,000 kids aged 6-14 for their word of the year, a third of them showed they couldn’t count and came back with ‘climate change’.
Redolent, though it is, of the legendary line from TV commentator Sid Waddell: “Only one word for that: magic darts!” – this is disturbing news. I mean, what is wrong with children these days? The clue’s in the name, kids!
To be fair, the fault also lies with the OUP. They’re lucky the Post Office is drawing all the flak at the moment or heads would surely roll. They had two chances to prevent this outrage: one, there should never have been space to write two words in the answer form; and two; once the results came in the lily-livered lexicographers should have put their foot down. Had they done so, the winner would have been ‘war’, with 31 per cent of the votes.
I ask again, what is wrong with kids these days? Why so negative? Since 2016 they’ve voted for ‘refugee’, ‘Trump’, ‘plastic’, ‘Brexit’, ‘coronavirus’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘Queen’ – a list that could only have been more depressing if they’d meant the band, not the monarch.
You may argue that it’s good that the nation’s youth are interested in these things, but the fact that these words have dominated their young lives is sad. Delve back through the non-existent archives to more innocent times and I imagine they (we) would have voted for words like ‘hulahoop’, ‘television’, ‘spaceman’, ‘clackers’, ‘Shep’, ‘skateboard’ and ‘Tiswas’. Are we doing enough to give kids proper positive pleasures that aren’t tainted by the toxic spillages of politics, pollution and pandemics?
Obviously not, because they’re rebelling against the system by voting en masse for two-word words of the year. This is their rock’n’roll, their teenage rampage. Notwithstanding the importance of the climate change agenda, nor the fact that ‘climatechange’ will probably be one word before too long, where will it end?
‘Cliimate change’ is the tip of the iceberg (albeit a rapidly melting one). The bookies are already taking bets on next year’s Children’s Word of the Year and my money’s on ‘I have of late, and wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth’?
