Tuesday 27 November 2007

Word of the day

Today's word is ruddslide ("did you mean mudslide?"), presumably from landslide, and refers to the Australian political events of 24 November. This recent coinage (three days old) has astonishingly achieved 55,000 results in a Google search today. There is a much less common synonym ruddbath (mudbath or bloodbath, I wonder?), but this term has virtually no results, despite being equally clever.

Why so many, so quick? The answer is blogs: everyone has a blog nowadays. The term was possibly coined by the Sydney Morning Herald on the 3rd of November, but even so, it had barely stirred until the 24th. Then the bloggers began . . .

Of course, references to the ruddslide are well and truly outnumbered by references to Natalie Gauci. Just check it out, if you need some real life perspective on what preoccupied Australians over the weekend.

1 comment:

TRR said...

The word seemed to spread extraordinarily quickly - one moment I was reading the paper thinking 'what a clever pun' and the next moment, everywhere I went people were using the word.

It's even been immortalised in Wikipedia (well, until someone removes it) in two places.

With a limited range of uses, will the word fade from use and our memory almost as quickly?