Hackpacker

Also becoming popular as a tattoo (image by Emily Lewis ) It’s not just words that go extinct, sometimes the symbols before or after them fall off the perch. Take the interrobang – not the sexual torture it sounds like but a handy combination of the exclamation mark and the question mark or ‽ . It was invented in 1962 to handle both alarming and questioning sentences, but despite getting a run on typewriters in the 1970s never really took off. It became defunctuation. The interrobang joins typographical oddities at the foggy end of the keyboard such as irony mark ؟ (a backward question mark invented in France and never seen in the USA) and asterism ⁂ (a triangle of three asterisks used to signal the end of a sub-chapter). Still, there is the hope of refunctuation as symbols get resurrected like the @ sign – once exclusively used by accountants for “at the rate of” before email jumpstarted its comeback.   In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment pag

It starts innocently enough with a birth announcement on Twitter, maybe an image of a new born on Facebook, then slides into a blog about your beautiful baby’s every poop (images included). If you’ve ever known more about a friend’s child’s bowel movements than their doctor then you’ve been a victim of oversharenting. The blog STFU Parents has become a watchdog for the worst offenders, pulling out cases like misspelled defences of homeschooling or opening up a Facebook page in honour of their precious child’s snot. They’ve even discovered new subtypes like mommyjacking , where an apparently innocent status like “I’m tired” becomes mommyjacked with comments like “You don’t know tired until you’ve had a teething baby screaming in your face at 3 AM!!!”. Child-free friends encountering this are officially allowed to respond by putting parents in a “timeout” in a bar somewhere. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

It sounds a little filthy, but this cheerful exclamation is just another word for awesome. The origin of amazeballs has been attributed to bitchy celeb blogger Perez Hilton who encouraged Twitter users to retweet it to make it a trending topic way back in 2009. Tim Burgess and his Amazeballs But the word (sometimes spelt amazballs) really jumped the shark in February 2012 when Tim Burgess of Brit indie band The Charlatans tweeted that he thought totes amazeballs would make a good breakfast cereal. Kellogg’s’ surreally took him at his word, producing a concoction of shortbread, raisins, marshmallows and chocolate-flavoured drops in a pack featuring a cartoon version of the singer. The sugared-up cereal should come with a pair of dentures in every box, though Burgess reckons it’s true to the word’s inspiration because it “sounded to me like something Willy Wonka would come up with.” In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

Pulp is the latest in a long list of 1990s bands with too-clever accountants and mortgages to service that are touring again. One of the Sheffield group's bigger hits was Disco 2000, a wry look at teen unrequited love and the hope of reunion when the millennium clocked over. Recorded in 1995, the song will take on an odd retro-futurism when it's performed this year - 11 years after the rendezvous deadline. Since this song bounced through Converse All Stars in the mid-90s we've stopped focusing on a point in the future as hopeful. All through the 20th century, the year 2000 was something to aim for, a number that became synonymous with the futuristic, from the ABC TV science program Towards 2000 ( which became Beyond 2000 then Beyond Tomorrow ) to the British comic 2000AD . But the hope for the year 2000 became infected with the Millennium Bug as Y2K became something to fear. By 1999 Silverchair snarled in their Anthem for the Year 2000: "Never knew we were living

When your work colleague asks you “Report QUESTION MARK” you’ve got a case of verbal texting on your hands. It’s that socially awkward mode of speech that texting and emails has left us with , where people believe they can no longer communicate tone and need to spell out their punctuation. We are so sick of these guys EXCLAMATION POINT. At its worst it can degenerate into emoticons – “You’re giving me FROWNY FACE right now and I need TONGUE POKING.” – and initialism - “Don’t make me LOL” – in conversation. Some try to specify font in conversation – “This joke is much funnier in Comic Sans” – but at its worst it becomes twitter speak. There’s nothing worse than talking to someone using hashtags in dialogue #justsayin. And it has to stop before people start trying to insert hyperlinks into speech FULL STOP. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. Off Verbal Texters appeared in Issue No. 374.