Colm O'Regan: What is 'mogging' and will it stand the test of time?

It came into online language no doubt from some weird message board where men boast about how much they hate women. Then became a verb.

Mogging is Collins Dictionary's word of the year:

Mogging.

I used to know it as something to do with cats. But now it's Collins Dictionary's word of the year: Mogging means to outshine someone. It’s a contraction of AMOG (alpha male of [the] group) which came into online language no doubt from some weird message board where men boast about how much they hate women. Then became a verb.

It's not mugging someone off. That’s to make someone look like an eejit which probably came from the more usual mugging or robbery on a street. That would have likely started as a boxing slang to hit someone in the face — mug — and eventually went to the street where a lot of fights end up. The mug-face meaning came from 17th century mugs that were shaped like faces.

We can go on like this all day.

Neither is mogging Jacob Reese Mogging which depending on your favourite era of JRM is: Lying on a Parliament couch, being a Boris Johnson chum, or acting 55 years old when he was 12.

He fell out of favour with Johnson’s downfall but then gained unlikely fans recently when Mogg mogged Maga mucker Tucker Carlson.

Every year four big dictionaries release their word of the year. The other three are due to release closer to Christmas. Oxford, Collins, Cambridge, and Merriam-Webster are the four wordsmiths of (usually) the apocalypse because the words generally describe the world going to hell in a hand cart.

But also not all of them last.

But when you look at the words of the year across the various dictionaries, over the last few years some might stay and some have already gone. Vibe coding, Rage bait, Parasocial, Slop, Brat, Brain rot, Manifest, Polarisation, AI, Rizz, Hallucinate, Authentic, Permacrisis, Goblin mode, Homer, Gaslighting, NFT, Vax, Perseverance, Vaccine, Lockdown, Quarantine, Pandemic, Climate strike, Climate emergency, Upcycling, They.

The covid era has passed. And I’m guessing the climate emergency era has passed too. We must have fixed it right? RIGHT? I’ve a feeling it will be back. Dust bowl will probably be the word of the year in 2032. It was in Carlow this year.

AI and Hallucinate will stick around. They’re in the back of your fridge now. Goblin mode seems forced. NFT (2019, non-fungible token) has disappeared just like the wealth invested in them. Brat will leave Charli XCX and go back to spoiled children.

Rizz just sounds good. Short of charisma. You might complain about it but words have lasted longer. Glam from glamorous. Con from Confidence, flu from influenza. I’m sure someone tutted about boomers saying this back in the day.

Dictionaries have been doing these words since at least 1990. The American dialect coined Bushlips then. Which sounds either very very rude, a type of flower, or some sort of Australian tradition. But it was just them being clever clever. Bushlips meant being insincere in politics after George HW Bush said “read my lips” No new taxes.

W00t was the word for Merriam-Webster 2007 because it reflected people gaming and texting and using zeroes instead of Os.

That seems CRINGE now (Germany’s Youth Word of the Year 2021). A whole generation ago. OMG, (Added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011). I. CAN’T. EVEN. (American Dialect Society most useful word of the year 2014.

Mogging will probably last. Despite its Make Fetch Happen etymology, it has one advantage. It’s easy to say, has a strong consonant g and that has the crucial O sound that is in a number of rude words like snot and pox and a few others.

Next year? I hope for obvious reasons it’s Tipping Away and Gallivanting.

• Colm’s latest book ‘Tipping Away’ is in bookshops now. Hopefully next to ‘Gallivanting With Words’.