'Climate porn', 'fanta pants' make it to Macquarie Dictionary 2008 edition

Sydney, Jan 8 (ANI): Climate porn, flashpacking, toxic debt, wellness tourism and fanta pants-these are just some of the new words and phrases that have made it to the Macquarie Dictionary's online edition.

According to the editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, Susan Butler, there was a big influence of America quite large on the list of words she selected, owing to the recent elections in the country.

"There were two big things that happened in 2008. One you can't use because it's a proper noun, and that's Obama. The second was subprime," The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Butler as saying.

However, she said that the inclusion of the British fanta pants "from the orange-coloured soft drink ... with reference to pubic hair as the indicator of hair colour" was a notable exception.

She claimed that the big trend for the year was the growth of environmental language, with words like ecocentrism, referring to the philosophy in which the ecosphere is more important than an organism or human activity, making it to the list.

Other environment-inspired words are plastic soup, referring to a mass of plastic on an ocean gyre; and climate porn, referring to alarmist predictions about the progress of global warming.

"There's 19 categories rather than 17 because environment had to be split into two. And then it is in politics as well," said Butler.

Les Murray, the poet and Macquarie committee member, picked out some of the words from the list and said that lifestreaming (the online recording of one's daily life) sounded better than what it meant.

Also, he predicted that Uberveillance (omnipresent electronic surveillance through devices embedded in the body) had more future than present.

And his pick for beauty was water footprint (the amount of fresh water used by a country, business or individual).

Macquarie readers are encouraged to vote online for their favourite word, from which a people's choice will be announced in February.

In 2007, the pick was password fatigue, referring to the feeling encountered when a vast number of passwords renders a user unable to remember any of them. (ANI)