A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays

by Shashi Tharoor

When my twin sons were little, and just beginning to discover the allure of strong language to let off steam, I managed to steer them away from the offensive terms they were hearing around them in the school playground by getting them to use more wholesome alternatives. My trick was simple: I had introduced them to my favourite series of comics by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin, masterfully translated into English.

Take a word as innocuous as snowflake. We all know the word, it falls from the sky—but now it is also used to mean ‘someone regarded or treated as unique or special’ and/or ‘someone who is overly sensitive’.

Vax is nicely versatile. As a noun, it’s just a vaccine or vaccination. As a verb, to vax means to vaccinate. If you’re opposed to vaccination, you’re anti-vax (an adjective), or an anti-vaxxer (another noun). If you’ve had two doses of a vaccine, you’re double-vaxxed (another adjective). And if you point your phone at yourself during or immediately before or after a vaccination, especially one against Covid-19, and then share it on social media, you’ve taken a vaxxie—a vaccination selfie.