‘Come off it,’ said my husband when I told him that upcycling was the word of the year. His response did not chime with the spirit of the Cambridge Dictionary in naming it: ‘We think that our fans resonated with upcycling not as a word in itself but with the positive idea behind it.’
I prefer words in themselves. But what was the dictionary to do? It posts a Word of the Day on Instagram, and upcycling received more ‘likes’ than any other Word of the Day.
Over at Collins Dictionary, they noticed a hundredfold increase in the use of climate strike in 2019, and made it the Collins word of the year. Last year, it had been single-use, an adjective qualifying plastic.
One notices a trend towards environmental terms. It is not that, in unprompted conversation at the Moreton-in-Marsh stop for the 801 bus to Bourton-on-the-Water, climate strikes and upcycling dominate.
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