New Words

I recently heard a handy word on the radio: wackaging. It's a new one on me, but perhaps not to you, as it's clearly been around for at least a decade, and was allegedly coined by Guardian journalist Rebecca Nicholson. It means:

"Wackaging" or wacky packaging, refers to the increasingly overly familiar, infantilised copy that’s become ubiquitous ever since Innocent adopted a wacky and distinctive tone of voice on their packaging in 2000.

It really is everywhere now, isn't it? An insistent mateyness coupled with a toe-curling cutesiness, as if some hipsterish cuddly toys had taken over the marketing and labelling of everything from biscuits to the toilet lids on South Western trains. No, really:

image: objective ingenuity

I have to read this silly babble every time I go up to London, and stand for a pee in front of it, swaying perilously in every direction as the train rocks and rolls over the rails. But, there, look, I've done it myself: "pee" is surely nothing more than baby talk for "piss", not forgetting its more malodorous cousin, "poo".

Baby talk or no, to openly declare your intention of going for a pee or a poo in most company would still come across as oddly "unfiltered", although to go full-on technical with talk of urination or defecation instead would be downright weird. Some things are eternally unmentionable, it seems, with the result that there have been many ways of politely expressing the need without being over-specific. Quite a few of these have disappeared: the need to "powder one's nose" (nothing to do with cocaine), or "spend a penny" (a reference to public-toilet cubicles that used to be coin-operated) and so on were all frequently-heard expressions in my childhood, readily understood, but now obsolete. Rather like that all-purpose brush-off, "Going to see a man about a dog" (as a response to the question, "Where are you going?"), which I also haven't heard for decades.

People have always tiptoed around the sensibilities of the innocent or the prudish, of course, but the rise of baby talk as polite talk seems a backwards step to me. This can get truly weird in the doctor's surgery. At some point, for example, the cutesy, infantile "tummy" seems to have become the normal word for "stomach". Is there really some sense in which "stomach", or even "belly", are inappropriate terms between adults? I suppose doctors will always have had a particular problem with what linguists call "register". They, of course, have a complete set of precise medical vocabulary which is often utterly incomprehensible to the typical patient, being based on an understanding of Latin and Greek. So compromises have always needed to be found, not least when referring to anything "down there" – problems with "the waterworks" and the like – but finding a suitable middle-ground can be tricky. [1] 

This is particularly the case when – as is so often the case in the NHS today – a medic's first language is not English. No matter how fluent, they will not have acquired the full set of appropriate euphemisms, or a native speaker's confidence in which are and which are not acceptable in polite company, so tend to fall back on the unambiguous trade-talk of med school. I was recently delighted to learn the word "flatus", for example, as a technical term for a fart, and was thoroughly confused when the same doctor, prodding what turned out to be a small umbilical hernia, pronounced that, yes, it did seem to be viscous, i.e. (in my non-medical vocabulary) "having a thick, sticky consistency between solid and liquid". Say what, doc? But the word he used was actually "viscus", i.e. innards of any description, for which there seems to be no baby-babble term. Tummy stuffing, maybe? This is unsurprising, I suppose, as our inner organs are rarely on display or the subject of non-specialist discussion, and when they are the circumstances are never particularly cosy. A little Latin can be a useful sedative.

Oh, stop it, Oatly...

To get back to wackaging, though. The desire and pursuit of cosiness is clearly one of its underlying motivations: advertising copy writers and packaging designers want us to associate warm feelings with a product. So if your image of Happy Times is to be curled up on a sofa cradling a cup of hot chocolate in your fleecy onesie – quite possibly accompanied by a talking cat – then I'm afraid to say that you have been wackaged. Or, worse, you may even be a cause of wackaging.

Some wackiness is de rigueur, too, obviously: there's no end of baffling, hallucinatory goings-on filling up the ad breaks. It's entertaining, sure, but can you figure out or remember from one break to the next what exactly was being advertised? Car insurance? Chocolate? LSD or ketamine, perhaps? Never has so much "creative" effort been lavished so profligately on so little (unless you take a very hard line on the religiosity of Renaissance art). But the more insidious motivation, I think, is the attempt to endow a product with a personality. Not just any personality, of course – coldly aloof, psychotically cruel, or pathetically needy wouldn't do – but something relatable, or – in another word currently in vogue, and not unconnected to the fashion for wackaging – adorable. Which is to say, like a particularly winsome toddler.

We could blame the Japanese for this, with their cult of cute, a.k.a. kawaii. But we've been doing this to ourselves forever without any foreign help, thank you very much. Or some of us have, anyway. The trouble starts when you take perfectly serviceable words and give them the infantilising makeover. I have always recoiled from any talk between consenting adults that involves emetically hypocoristic items like "choccy" (chocolate) or "biccies" (biscuits). I'm with Dorothy Parker here:

And it is that word "hummy," my darlings, that marks the first place in "The House at Pooh Corner" at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

(Parker's Constant Reader column, New Yorker, October 12, 1928)

True, to be repelled by soppiness in all its manifestations may be a side effect of the masculinisation process I and most boys underwent in the 1950s. I must have mentioned, for example, how my grandfather used to throw worms at me in the garden, having learned that I was afraid of them ("Only girls are afraid of worms!"). But you surely don't have to be some spartanised male to want to punch anyone who refers to Christmas as – argh! – "Crimble", or to their drooling, overweight lapdog as their "baby"?

So, I hope you, too, will feel able to resist these cynical attempts to turn the world into an episode of the Teletubbies. Just stop it, Oatly: you are not my adorably wacky bestie, you are a carton of oat milk. In fact, you are not a "you" at all, you are an "it"; please take a step back or I'll ... I'll buy something else, something with a little more dignity.

BTW, if "hypocoristic" isn't a new word to you, too, then congratulations (what, you didn't look it up?). I found it, used it, and will probably have forgotten it within a week... You're welcome.

Just fuck offibobble, EE...

1. Doctors themselves seem to have a problem with their more tongue-twisting medical vocabulary. Sadly, I notice that "ear, nose, and throat" (ENT) has almost completely ousted the wonderfully obscure "otorhinolaryngology" (ORL) as a medical speciality.