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The Oxford Dictionary of New Words compiled by Sara Tullock, Oxford
University Press, pp 322, £12.95

Open this at your own risk. You will at once be hypnotised. It is impossible
not to dip into it straightaway. Nobody, in my experience, ever looks at
a dictionary in a sober and proper manner, reading the foreword and the
explanation of symbols and pronunciation. They dash headlong into the words
and only when they have found something puzzling or delightful do they refer
to the formal preambles.

So instead of solemnly reading the instructions on how to use this dictionary
I went head first into page 90. ‘Donutting’, it said, ‘see doughnutting’.
So I saw doughnutting, with some slight reluctance, because under the entry,
it also said, ‘Doom and gloom; see gloom and doom’, another signpost to
potential pleasure.

‘Doughnutting’ turns out to be television jargon, and it means the clustering
of politicians round a speaker during a broadcast of a parliamentary debate,
to fill the shot and to make it appear that the speaker has enthusiastic
support. I have never seen or heard the word before, though the dictionary
quotes a report in The Daily Telegraph that used it.

Now comes the feature of the dictionary that should entice people away
from the trivial round or common task. The entries are followed by short
essays on the origin of the word and its career in contemporary language.
‘Doughnutting’ is supposed to be Canadian, springing to life when debates
in the Ottawa parliament began on television, but Canadian papers offer
no evidence of it. Its use in popular sources, says the entry, ‘promises
to be shortlived’.

And so engrossingly onwards and backwards throughout. I always thought
that ‘bottle’ was a shortened form of the rhyming slang ‘bottle and glass,
meaning ‘class’, but that does seem to be wrong.

This magazine appears as a source of quotation. (It makes us quietly
proud.) All those irritating ‘ists’ are here, ‘sexists’, ‘ageists’, ‘ableists’,
the lot. Everywhere there is something to discover. Try your friends with
‘lemon law’, or ‘logic bomb’, ‘rootsy’ and ‘rust belt’ and be amazed at
how many new words you have unconsciously added to your vocabulary. At this
very moment you may be thinking that yah, the hard Ecu ought to be zapped
and consigned to the wheeliebin. If it were, you could celebrate with a
quaffable wine – it’s tubular.

My advice if you get the book would be to take a day off. And before
you open it, make sure you’ve got your sandwiches.