New words keep popping up every day.
I’m sure that none of my grandparents would know what we mean by “Keurig.” When they spoke of a stream, they always meant a creek or river, but every Sunday churches now stream their worship. My Grandmother Key was deathly afraid of twisters (tornados). Instead of being of a howling storm, though, today “twister” means a ridiculous dance used on TV ads to sell everything from toothpicks to funerals.
Ditto for “flossing.” Until recent years, it always meant a dental procedure, but now it’s a dance — the gyration of the hips and swaying of the buttocks now used in a maddening number of TV ads.
The first time I heard “vaxxing” was during the Covid panic, when everybody from doctors to politicians were urging all of us get vaccinated.
Do you remember when “spoofing” meant a joke you played on a friend? In this age of digital dishonesty, it now means a way for scam artists to disguise their identity. Until recent months, though, I had never heard the term “smishing.” The CyberGuy website says it means “a scam in which a scammer will attempt to mimic a reputable company through a text message.”