The year in words

As I was slipping a pudding into the water to boil a bellowing noise like the questing beast in Malory made me jump. But I did not drop it. ‘My word of the year,’ said my husband, blowing like a tuba-player through a rolled up copy of the Radio Times. ‘Vuvuzela. We’d never heard of it till this summer. It’s a thing and it has no other name.’

Despite the annoying nature of the thing and the imitation of it by my husband, he is right. It is strange that Oxford University Press chose big society. Not only does no one know its meaning, but it is practically a proprietary name. Other words on its shortlist of 12 were stranger. Los 33, taken from the note attached to a drill-bit by the Chilean mine survivors, looks memorable, but how would you pronounce it? Double dip was notable for not, fortunately, being the defining word of the year.