Adorbs: It’s an adjective used informally to mean “Inspiring great delight; cute or adorable.” Examples the dictionary gives are: “all the pets are totally adorbs”; “check out the adorbs photo”; “newborn babies are so adorb.” The dictionary etymologizes the word as an early 21stcentury modification of “adorable.” I have never come across this word before, and I’m unlikely to ever use it.
2. Cord cutting.This expression is defined as “The practice of canceling or forgoing a cable television subscription or landline telephone connection in favor of an alternative Internet-based or wireless service.” A usage example is, “The cable industry has seen a decline in television subscribers as customers engage in cord cutting.”
Many people outside the West may not be able to relate to this expression for many obvious reasons. For one, canceling cable subscription isn’t an option for most people in the developing world because broadband Internet connection is still a luxury. Second, landline telephone connection never quite took off in many developing countries to start with, so canceling it isn’t part of people’s experiential repertoire there.
3. Cray or Cray Cray.The dictionary defines this word as the short form of “crazy” and says it’s chiefly American. Usage examples include: “I have a feeling this is gonna get cray”; “She’s cray cray.” I’ve actually first heard this word from my 10-year-old daughter. I didn’t think it would get lexicographical imprimatur.
4. Dox (also doxx).This word is spawned by online interactions. It’s defined as “Search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.” Examples are: “Hackers and online vigilantes routinely dox both public and private figures”;“Perhaps the greatest threat is their contacts with other hackers who are more than willing to dox them.”
Perhaps the best example of a doxing in Nigerian cyberspace was the unmasking of presidential aide Reno Omokriby Nigerian cyber sleuthhounds. Omokri sent out a libelous news release against former Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Sanusis Lamido Sanusi (who is now the emir of Kano) with the false name Wendell Simlin, but wasn’t careful enough to cover his cyber tracks, so he was doxed.
Dox, according to the Oxford Dictionaries, is the “alteration of docs, plural of doc (short for document).”
5. Hate-watch (noun is hate-watching).It means to “Watch (a television program) for the sake of the enjoyment one derives from mocking or criticizing it.” Some usage examples the dictionary gives are “I hate-watched every single episode”; “It was the year that hate-watching became our national pastime.”
I think this word actually fills a real lexical void in the language and is likely to endure. On a personal note, it perfectly captures my relationship with Nigerian movies. (Read my January 1, 2009 article titled “When Art Imitates Dreams: A Commentary on Nigerian Movies”)
A related word is “binge-watch,” which is defined as “watch[ing] multiple episodes of a television program in rapid succession.”
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