Another Day, Another Word We’re Apparently Supposed to Know.
GenX is constantly being accused of being angry. Apparently, we’re perpetually irritated, permanently unimpressed and generally walking around with an expression suggesting someone has just parked in our favourite parking spot.
Well, excuse us!
We were born in the 60s, grew up in the 70s and 80s, sought validation in the 90s, and entered the great midlife crisis era somewhere in the 2010s. We’ve survived disco, shoulder pads, questionable hairstyles, questionable parenting advice, economic uncertainty and the invention of social media. We’ve witnessed the transition from analogue to digital, from rotary phones to smartphones, from handwritten letters to emojis, and from looking things up in encyclopaedias to asking artificial intelligence for answers.
Our language and terminology have performed enough 360-degree corkscrew turns over those decades to make an Olympic gymnast dizzy. Think about it. Words and expressions that were perfectly commonplace in the 60s and 70s would have us hauled before the modern-day language police today. Take golliwog, for instance. Once considered an innocent children’s character in certain parts of the world, it is now rightly recognised as a racist caricature. Other examples include coloured, Oriental, Eskimo, cripple and retarded. Terms once routinely encountered in everyday conversation, literature, newspapers and official descriptions have since acquired discriminatory or derogatory associations, or have been replaced by more respectful and precise terminology.
There’s also gypsy, a word that appeared in children’s books, songs, films, fashion descriptions and everyday conversation, sometimes romanticised as a description of a wandering, free-spirited lifestyle. Its history is considerably less romantic. The word originated from the mistaken belief that the Romani people came from Egypt and became associated with centuries of stereotyping, discrimination and persecution. Today, many Roma and Romani people consider the term offensive or inappropriate, although some individuals and communities use it for themselves. Context and personal preference matter.
Language changes as society evolves, and we learn to adjust. Sometimes, however, the changes involve more than replacing an outdated expression. Remember the word gay? We grew up knowing it to mean happy, cheerful, carefree, merry and full of joy. It also had a rather distinguished literary history. Jane Austen used it to describe lively social settings and fashionable society. In Pride and Prejudice, she refers to Brighton as a “gay bathing-place”, evoking its lively social atmosphere. Charles Dickens, in The Pickwick Papers, described Christmas as a time when “Gay and merry was the time”, while Thomas Hardy, in Under the Greenwood Tree, even played on the word’s different meanings in a conversation about being cheerful and wearing gay, or brightly coloured, dresses. To be gay was to be merry, lively or attractively dressed. A gay evening was simply an enjoyable evening. Nobody needed a glossary to understand that.
During the 20th century, the word increasingly acquired its association with homosexuality. The more formal term homosexual was also used, particularly in medical and clinical contexts. By the latter half of the century, gay had become widely adopted as a positive identity term within the community and beyond. The vocabulary subsequently expanded to LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQ+ and other variations intended to recognise a broader spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities. We encountered bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, non-binary and other terminology along the way.
These terms aren’t interchangeable. Some describe sexual orientation, others gender identity, and others sex characteristics. The evolving vocabulary reflects people’s efforts to find more accurate and inclusive ways to describe themselves and their experiences. Fair enough. People deserve the language to describe who they are. For a generation that remembers when gay simply meant happy, however, keeping up with the expanding terminology has occasionally required a mental software update.
The 1990s brought another linguistic challenge when we entered the workforce, put on our metaphorical suits and discovered that doing a perfectly good job wasn’t enough. We also needed to speak the language of business.
Suddenly, everything was about synergy, paradigm shifts, thinking outside the box, leveraging resources and blue-sky thinking. We weren’t simply working anymore. We were optimising deliverables, maximising efficiencies and creating synergies. Half the time, nobody knew what any of it meant, but it sounded terribly important in a boardroom. Apparently, a perfectly straightforward meeting about getting things done required its own vocabulary.
Parenthood in the 90s introduced yet another set of linguistic challenges. Just when we thought we’d mastered the language of adulthood, our children arrived with an entirely new vocabulary. We went from hip to cool to bad, which, depending on the decade and context, could actually mean good. Suddenly, sick could be excellent, wicked could be wonderful, and being on fleek was apparently a desirable state of existence. The dictionary was becoming a moving target.
Social media accelerated the process considerably, creating an entirely new linguistic universe that we were expected to navigate. A selfie became a recognised photographic genre because apparently taking a photograph of yourself required its own noun. The hashtag gave the humble pound sign an entirely new career. Influencer became a profession, viral no longer necessarily required medical attention, and DM acquired a completely different meaning.
For those of us who remember Germany before the euro, DM meant Deutsche Mark. It was money. Actual currency. You could hold it, spend it and keep a few notes tucked away. Today, apparently, DM means Direct Message. One abbreviation, two entirely different generations, and a potential misunderstanding in a conversation that could get rather expensive if we’re not paying attention.
Naturally, we learned the platforms, figured out the algorithms, acquired hashtags, developed online personas and discovered that a photograph could have a life of its own depending on the caption, timing and number of likes. We even learned to distinguish between trolls, bots, stans and people simply having a bad day.
Language, however, doesn’t evolve exclusively through fashion, technology and generational preferences. History can give words meanings so far removed from their original definitions that they become almost unrecognisable.
Consider salvage. In ordinary English, it means to rescue, save or recover something from destruction or loss. In the Philippines, however, the word acquired a particularly dark meaning. The expression was already circulating in the 1960s as slang for killing, but during the Ferdinand Marcos Sr. era, particularly following the imposition of martial law in 1972, it became strongly associated with extrajudicial executions and political killings. People were abducted, tortured and killed, sometimes with their bodies subsequently dumped in public places. A word that ordinarily meant rescuing or recovering something had become a chilling euphemism for taking a human life.
For Filipinos who lived through those years, salvage was never just another English word. It carried the memory of fear, disappearances, political violence and loss. Language can reflect changing social conventions, but it can also preserve the collective memory of a nation’s history.
Which brings us rather neatly to the present day.
A recent BBC article caught my attention when I came across the announcement that Collins English Dictionary had selected mogging as its Word of the Year for 2026. Apparently, the word had experienced a 210% increase in usage over the preceding year. Naturally, I had questions. Not least of which was: what on earth is mogging? The BBC article became the inspiration for this little linguistic excursion down memory lane.
So, what exactly is mogging?
To mog someone is to outshine, outperform or upstage them. The term originated in online subcultures, particularly those concerned with physical appearance, attractiveness and male dominance. It is generally traced back to the acronym AMOG, meaning Alpha Male Of the Group, and circulated in bodybuilding and manosphere communities before finding its way into mainstream internet culture.
Its modern usage is considerably broader. Someone can looks-mog, height-mog, style-mog or performance-mog another person. In other words, someone is better, taller, prettier, more fashionable or simply more impressive than somebody else. It can be used playfully, ironically or competitively, depending on the context.
We’ve managed perfectly well with words such as outperform, outshine, outclass, overshadow and upstage. Apparently, those weren’t sufficient. We needed mogging. We’ve gone from synergy to selfies, from paradigm shifts to hashtags, from corporate jargon to internet slang, and now we’re expected to understand yet another word describing the art of being better than somebody else. Here I thought we’d already established that life wasn’t supposed to be a permanent competition.
Hell no!
At this point, I would like to submit a formal request for a linguistic sabbatical. We’ve learned the terminology, updated the vocabulary, adjusted the spelling, reconsidered the expressions and survived several generations of people telling us that we’re using words incorrectly. Can we not just have a little peace?
Perhaps the problem isn’t that GenX is angry. Maybe we’re simply exhausted from having to keep up with the never-ending software updates to the English language. We’ve been adapting for six decades, and just when we think we’ve got the hang of things, somebody comes along and changes the terminology again.
So forgive us if we occasionally roll our eyes, raise an eyebrow or ask someone to explain what on earth they’re talking about. We’re not necessarily being difficult. We’re just trying to keep our vocabulary from becoming obsolete before breakfast.
As for mogging, I have absolutely no intention of participating. I’m perfectly happy being my own particular brand of fabulous. Besides, I have more important things to do, like making coffee.
For further reading:
Collins Dictionary Blog on the 2026 word of the year
BBC on Mogging as the word of the year
