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The Collins Words of the Year

(Part 3)
11 Comments
More vocabulary explanations & discussion of big issues, including how social media affects
our worldview, the pros and cons of fidget spinners and debates about gender identity,
including thoughts on the new female Doctor in Doctor Who. Transcript available.
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Part 3 – Transcript (99% complete)

Welcome back to part 3 of this series I’m doing about the Collins Dictionary Words of the
Year. I’m going through the list of words from 2017 and then the plan is to move onto the
words for 2018 and talk about them with Amber. She’s coming round here tomorrow morning
actually.

So the Words of the Year – Collins select these lists of words every year, based on which
words they’ve noticed being used a lot in this 12 month period. They’re not necessarily new
words, and they might be phrases made from existing words. The main thing is that these
words have risen in use significantly during the period and as a result they tap into issues,
events and feelings that are very current.

Talking about the words of the year on the podcast is both a way for me to explore some
vocabulary and also just talk about some issues of the moment.

Check the page on the website for this episode in order to see a lot of the things I’m saying
written there, as transcripts and for other information.

Talking about these words, and discussing them also involves using various other useful bits
of vocabulary that you can learn from me. Listening to episodes of this podcast can help you
raise your level of English, starting with your listening skills – but the benefits to your
English can be many, including developing your awareness of pronunciation, expanding your
vocabulary, noticing aspects of grammar and all of this helps you with your speaking skills
too. That’s the plan. Certainly, listening regularly, listening for longer periods and listening to
something that I hope holds your attention – this is all really healthy for your English, so let’s
keep going.

I have 6 words/phrases to deal with in this episode, so let’s not hang about.

In part 1 of the series I talked about how Collins uses data to make its dictionaries and other
language reference books and I talked for quite a long time about the phrase fake
news which topped their Words of the Year list for 2017.
Then in part 2 I talked about other words in the list for 2017, including antifa,
corbynmania, and cuffing season.

I’ve got 6 words left. Let’s see if I can deal with them all in part 3 here. Let’s go.
 Echo chamber
noun: an environment, especially on a social media site, in which any statement of opinion
is likely to be greeted with approval because it will only be read or heard by people who hold
similar views .

The concept is, that if you live in an echo chamber, you only ever hear your own opinions
coming back to you.

Echo (a verb and a noun) is when you make a sound and it travels away from you and then
bounces off a surface and comes back to you. It’s like if you’re in a huge hallway and you go
“hello!” and you then hear your own voice coming back to you, saying “hello!”

Hello hello hello ? ? ?

Echo echo echo ! ! !

So the echo chamber idea – when you live in a world in which you only ever hear or read your
own ideas.

Nowadays there is so much media content out there, including news and just different
opinions and comments about the world, and we have the ability to filter out certain things.

Eventually, if you only choose to see or hear things that you like, you’ll never hear about any
conflicting opinions, you’ll never face disagreement, contradiction, challenge or other points
of view. This can be quite dangerous. It makes you soft and unprepared for your ideas to be
challenged. It can make you small minded because you only get a blinkered view of the
world – you don’t get exposed to different opinions and it makes you unaware of what’s
really going on in the world. It’s like living in a bubble. When something big happens, it can
seem totally shocking and unbelievable.

Weirdly, in this super connected world, we are less and less connected and more and more
divided, as we put ourselves into these more carefully defined personal categories and only
receive information that fits with that category, we become more separated from the
experiences of other groups of people.

That’s the theory behind the expression, echo chamber. Generally, this expression is a buzz
word for this whole phenomenon.

Filtering out opposing viewpoints and living in a bubble.

These circumstances can push us away from each other, and make it harder to understand
different opinions.
The results of the Brexit referendum and US presidential election in 2016 were both greeted
with disbelief and shock by some people. The people on the losing side could not understand
how their opponents refused to have their opinions changed by apparently reasonable
arguments, while the winners remained convinced of the rightness of their own cause.

Basically, we were surprised and shocked by the existence of other points of view. Experts
said that this situation was due to many people living in an ‘echo chamber’, where they only
hear the views of people who share and reinforce their own opinions. This is increasingly
possible when people form online communities that exclude any voices that challenge or
threaten them.

For example, a lot of people no longer read newspapers or get their news from the TV.
Instead they perhaps just look at Twitter to see what’s going on, but on Twitter you choose
each and every account that you follow so you cherry pick the content, rather than just
receiving the same information as everyone else.

Also it’s quite common to block people who disagree with you or argue with you. The result
is an echo-chamber. And it’s not just for people who didn’t vote for Trump or Brexit. There
are right-wing echo chambers too, including social media sites that welcome the types of
opinions that are not really accepted by more conventional social media. So everyone is
capable of living in an echo chamber.

The term ‘echo chamber’ originally referred to a room that scientists constructed to create
echoes for use in sound recording or experiments.

Echo chambers are used to create real echoes which can be used for music or sound
recording, instead of relying on digital echo (delay) effects.

Often the best echo chambers for music are bathrooms because they have those shiny
ceramic tiles that let the sound bounce around nicely. That’s one of the reasons it’s nice to
sing in the shower. Your voice echoes off the tiles and it sounds pretty good!

The idea of an environment where you can hear your own voice repeated back to you made
this a perfect metaphor for the world of social media, where many people only talk with
those who agree with them, thus creating a rather distorted picture of what the world is
really like.

Do you live in an echo chamber?

A real echo chamber in a music studio. Actual echo chambers are used to create genuine
echo and reverb effects. Check it out! What a cool studio!
Fidget spinner
 noun: a small toy comprising of two or
three prongs arranged around a central bearing, designed to be spun by the fingers as
means of improving concentration or relieving stress.
This is so 2016/2017. I don’t know if people still use them or talk about them. Perhaps kids
these days have moved on and talking about fidget spinners is not cool at all.

They look a bit like little wheels and you hold them between your fingers, flick them and they
spin around and around quite satisfyingly. They’re fun to just fidget with, and fidgeting with
them is quite addictive.

So, it’s just a fun toy that spins in your hand, right? No arguments and politics here, right?
Nope – even fidget spinners divide people too!

Let’s look at the for & against.

For
It’s fun!
People say they’re good for kids with ADHD and autism.
From iheisthmus.com www.theisthmus.com.au/2017/06/fidget-spinners-the-for-the-against-
the-important/

The biggest argument from the pro-spinners side is that they are a useful tool for kids with
ADHD, autism, anxiety, and other similar conditions. Occupational therapist Sandra Mortimer
said “It can help with emotional regulation for children feeling anxious, worried and
nervous.”

While there is no academic research about fidget spinners in particular, fidget tools (such as
putty and stress balls) have long been known to help with this. The lack of specific
academic research is to be expected though– fidget spinners are only a few months old, and
research takes literally forever (well, a really long time at least).

There are some pretty cool creative uses for it (although as far as I can see this just means
letting them spin in different places). E.g. balance a spinner on your fingers, make them spin
on a table and see how long it spins, throw them between your hands while they spin, spin
them and switch them onto different fingers, spin it and put it onto your nose, etc…

Against
As a fidget tool – it’s not a very good one. It’s big, it requires hand eye coordination so kids
have to look at it – so it’s actually very distracting. It’s hard to just spin it in your hand and
not look at it. So you can’t use it while working for example, or just have it in your pocket. It
tends to use all your concentration.
It’s just an annoying trend and they’ll probably be forgotten in a few years until they come
back as the latest nostalgia toy.

Have you ever used one?

Do your kids have them?

Gender-fluid

adjective: not identifying exclusively with one

gender rather than another

So, it means when people don’t feel they have a fixed gender. They might feel male
sometimes and female at other times and perhaps even feel like they belong to some other
gendered category that we don’t even really have the language to describe.

Oh no, we’re back on difficult territory again! This is another minefield of a topic.

Now I remember why I kept putting off doing this episode! Too many trigger warnings,
potential problems and complexity! But it’s a big subject at the moment, so let’s have a
look…

This word relates to people who don’t identify as having a fixed gender.

Noun: gender fluidity

Some quick examples from a Google News search for “gender fluid”.

Pearl Mackie: It’s 2017- the Doctor is gender fluid

PinkNews-Dec 15, 2017
Outgoing Doctor Who star Pearl Mackie has responded to the backlash against a female
Doctor, saying that the Doctor is gender fluid and the gender of the actor doesn’t matter.
Loki will be pansexual and gender-fluid in new Marvel novel
Washington Blade Dec 13, 2017
Marvel is releasing a series of three novels focusing on anti-heroes in 2019. One novel will
focus on Loki, Thor’s adopted brother and nemesis. Author Mackenzi Lee took to Twitter to
answer questions about the project and informed fans that Loki is “canonically a pansexual
and genderfluid character.”
Men in skirts: gender-fluid fashion is no longer a novelty
Times LIVE-Dec 14, 2017
The ancient Egyptians, Romans, Zulus, Scots and countless others didn’t wear trousers and
no one thought of them as effeminate. [Luke: I challenge anyone to find a bunch of Scottish
men in kilts and to tell them they are effeminate! Ha! Good luck with that pal.] The same
could be said of jewellery and many other fashion items. We spoke to a couple of experts to
find out why gender-fluid fashion is trending.

Some people see this as progress, others see it and just get really angry. They get ‘triggered’
by it, using that expression again from part 1 of this series.

I’m just not going to get into it at great length because I exhausted myself with “fake news”
and “antifa” and I’m going to take a pass on this one.

Do you have an opinion on this?

It’s complex. It’s not just – do you mind that people define their identity outside the
traditional binary gender roles. It’s not just that. It’s also things like how this affects various
changes in society. Some people think it’s all progress, others are really losing their minds
about it, other people are just putting their foot down and saying “wait, I don’t mind how you
identify – you’re free to be whoever you want, but don’t force me to change my world” – that
type of thing.

Gender-fluid people or transgender people are saying “Hey, it would be really nice and
respectful if you could just acknowledge my identity and perhaps make a few changes to
make me feel like I belong in this world – like maybe you can use different language to make
me feel accepted – in fact, we’re working on making it illegal to refuse to do so”, and those
who disagree are saying “you can’t force me to do things like use certain language by law” –
and then other people are far less respectful and reasonable in their dialogue, and there’s
just a lot of abuse and hate speech flying around too. And then there are people like me who
are going “what? Sorry, what? Who said… wait? Who’s right? What’s going on? What year is
it???”

Oh, it’s probably worth mentioning Doctor Who again.

The 13th Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker

So, as you may know, Doctor Who is a British science fiction TV show that’s been on
television longer than a lot of people have been alive. I think it has the record as the longest
running TV series ever, having started in 1963 and still going strong today.

In a nutshell, Doctor Who is about a time-travelling alien (who looks human and speaks
English and everything) who travels around in a blue police box, generally saving the earth.
It’s a lot of fun and is very inventive, creative and funny and many generations of people in
the UK grew up as children watching the show. My parents grew up with it, my brother and I
grew up with it, our nieces and nephews are growing up with it.

The character, called The Doctor, has actually died lots of times, but every time the Doctor
dies – usually when he comes to the end of his current life-span, he regenerates in a new
form.

Basically, at the end of a season the Doctor dies and then is reborn but with a new actor in
the next season (or series as we usually say in British English actually!)

It’s a really cool way of keeping a TV series going. Each new incarnation of the Doctor is
different in that they have a certain look, they have certain characteristics – brought by the
different actor in the role each time, but also the Doctor always maintains certain core
characteristics like charisma, leadership, strength, courage, eccentricity, humour, love for
the humans and a desire to protect us, certain human companions and the blue spaceship or
TARDIS (actually a craft that travels through both space and time).

There have been loads of actors playing the doctor over the years, and millions of us are
very affectionate towards this character and the actors who have played him (or her).

Then this year, the producers of the show decided that the new Doctor would be played by a
woman. Jodie Whittaker was chosen – a good British actress. So now, The Doctor is a
woman. It turns out, the Doctor is a gender-fluid character. She doesn’t always regenerate
as a man, she can regenerate as a woman too. Naturally, a lot of people were really pissed
off, saying things like “The Doctor is not a woman! You’ve ruined this character and my
memories of childhood! Stop this PC nonsense from infecting everything! This is just the
loony left at the BBC trying to infect everything with poisonous feminism! Leave our TV
characters alone!”

I read some comments saying things like, “It’s The Doctor, not The Nurse – he should be a
man!” A lot of it is just sexism. I understand that people don’t like change, and this character
is very close to people’s hearts, but there’s actually no reason why The Doctor can only be
male. It’s a fictional time travelling alien from another planet, that changes shape when it
dies. I think it can turn into a woman, that’s fine!

I haven’t actually seen any of the episodes in their entirety. I must admit that these days
whenever I watch Doctor Who, I’m just completely confused! It’s great and there’s something
very comforting about the fact that the show still going after all these years, but the
storylines always confuse me completely. I have seen clips of the new Doctor Who with
Jodie Whittaker and it looks good. She’s funny and a bit weird and charismatic and that’s the
spirit of the character. I personally don’t mind that the doctor is a woman at the moment. I
think the writers can do whatever they like with the character.

As long as the writing is still good, the acting is good, the general hallmarks of Doctor Who
are still the same, I think it’s ok.

I’d be more upset if the writers of Doctor Who changed something more important about the
character – like deciding she now shouldn’t have a sense of humour, or that she should stop
caring about people, or that she loses the Tardis or something like that. That would be
worse. The Doctor becoming a woman – doesn’t really change the spirit of the character that
much and if anything it brings something fresh to the role, and it looks like Jodie Whittaker
is great and loads of fun, like the Doctor should be.

So, female Doctor Who – why not?

But I don’t think this really counts as proper gender fluidity actually, because it’s a fictional
alien character. I think gender fluidity is more likely to impact our lives in more real ways
than this. Like for example how it is affecting language and conversations about language.

For example, what pronouns do we use to refer to people who have different gender
identities, like people who identify as neither a woman nor a man, or some other gender
which is a combination of both somehow. People might say “I feel that I am neither a man
nor a woman” “I’m both and the language doesn’t have the words to reflect that, so we need
to introduce some new words to include us, because if we’re not included in the language,
then the culture is extremely prejudiced against us.” Also, trans-gender or gender-fluid
people can feel very rejected or unrepresented or offended when their identity isn’t
recognised by people, specifically when the wrong pronouns are used.

Pronouns – words like he, she, her, his and so on.

So some people want to introduce new pronouns to reflect the diversity of gender identities
out there and they want to introduce new laws which say it’s technically a hate crime to use
the wrong pronouns.

I don’t know if this kind of thing has ever happened before and there are several debates
combined in this. There’s the “Do people have the right to change their gender if they feel
that way?” and in my opinion I kind of think, well, why not I think people should be allowed
to do what they want. But a second debate is, “Do they get to legislate what language we
can and can’t use?”

Forcing people to use certain forms of language by law – I just don’t know what to think
about that. That does seem a bit like controlling people’s freedom to use language, but this
whole thing exists in a very fuzzy and grey area involving freedom of speech and also the
problem of hate speech and so on… It’s a moral maze.

And so, that’s where we’ll leave this subject. I’d like to think it’s ok for me not to have an
opinion on some things. That’s my “I have rights” card here – I claim the right to just not
have an opinion, thanks very much. I’m not ready to decide what I think about it all yet, and
that’s ok. I’m allowed to do that, and so are you.

I know, you’re not even asking for my opinion, right? And I have no duty to give you my
opinion.

Anyway, it’s interesting and you’re hearing all the words I’m using to talk about it, right?

This is the end of part 3! This series is longer

than I expected. Part 4 coming soon…