Such phrases as Trumpertantrum, trumpkin, and trumponomics fuelled by the strong feelings engendered by the newly elected tangerine president of the U.S, will be considered for entry into the OED.
The pejorative terms have stemmed mainly from debates between Donald Trump and his critics. Trumponomics refers to the president’s economic plan, a trumpertantrum refers to one of his angry tweets, whilst a trumpkin is a pumpkin carved to resembled Trump.
These and other words have been added to a watchlist which identifies phrases to be fast-tracked into the Oxford English Dictionary. Other phrases created by recent political upheaval are also to be included.
‘Brexit’ and ‘alt-right’ were added last year and Bremainian, used to refer to remain supporters by Brexiteers might be added along with the Trump neologisms. Brexit is recorded as the highest profile word using ‘exit’ as a suffix.
A trumpkin is a pumpkin carved to resembled Trump
Eleanor Maier associate editor of the Oxford English Dictionary said: “The –exit suffix seems to be following the model of –gate suffix, in giving rise to a number of ephemeral words.” She added: “So it may be that in the future, the –exit suffix is a dictionary entry in its own right.”
Maier commented that although a word would normally need to be in common usage for roughly ten years before it was added to the dictionary, exceptions were made if a word achieved currency in an unusual amount of time. She added the further qualification that it would normally have to be able to be used without an explanation.
She continued “Not everything we log will satisfy our inclusion criteria and some of them are likely to be relatively short-lived,” she said. “But it means we have a record of the usage and a place to add evidence and developments.”
Maier identified social media as the root of the rapid spread of such phrases. She claimed such words spread from the relatively small number of users on Twitter into the wider world.
Other Trump-isms include Trumpflation, defined as the inflation analysts predict as a result of Trump’s presidency; Trumpist, a Trump support; Trumpette, a female trumpist; and Trumpista, an – admittedly rare – Hispanic supporter.
Editors of the dictionary warned, however, that the popularity of such phrases would not guarantee them a place. “It may seem that the current political situation has given rise to new words at a faster rate than before, but it would be interesting to see if Lincoln, Reagan, Thatcher, and Clinton, for example, inspired at the time a similar number of short-lived, and now forgotten, neologisms,” Maier said.
