Are you a 'chav' or 'retrosexual'?From correspondents in LondonOctober 19, 2004

AN English language fanatic has charted the course of "buzzword" history with a compilation of new dictionary entries from 1904 to 2004.In 1904 it was "hip." In 2004 it's "chav." In between, there was "racism," "cyborg," "punk" and "9/11."
They are all words chosen by a book that charts the creation of new words over the past 100 years.
Author and word lover Susie Dent has delved into the social and political concerns of society to choose a word for each year to provide a snapshot of it.
Each word in Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report made its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in its year of nomination.

Some words provide a distillation of the social or political scene in the given year - "U-boat" in 1916, "demob" in 1920, "Blitzkrieg" in 1939, "peacenik" in 1963, "Watergate" in 1972, "punk" in 1974, "dot-commer" in 1997 and "9/11" in 2001.
Others surprise at how early they appear chronologically - "spliff" in 1962, "mobile phone" in 1945, "wonderbra" in 1947, "generation X" in 1952 and "cyborg" in 1960.
"If you look at teddy bear (1906) for example, it came about as a result of (U.S. President) Teddy Roosevelt," Dent said.
"Mobile phone was almost certainly military technology postwar. It disappeared for a while, surfaced for a little bit in the 1960s but there were few users and it didn't explode until the 1970s and 1980s."
Oxford University Press, which is publishing Dent's book on November 19, notes that English is the fastest-moving language in the world, as well as the largest.
"A lot of European countries have language academies that preserve their nature of their languages but we've never had an academy in English," Dent said.
"There's no single authority saying what you can have and what you can't. I think that's fantastic because then English just moves as we need it to."
Some words in the list have not stood the test of time - "tiddly-om-pom-pom" in 1909, "lumpenproletariat" in 1924, "beatnik" in 1958 and "beatbox" in 1982.
Many others have, often popping up with renewed meaning decades later - "hip" in 1904, "celeb" in 1913, "ceasefire" in 1918, "racism" in 1935, "fast food" in 1951, "awesome" in 1961.
"For celeb, the first citation was a letter to US President Woodrow Wilson and some person writing in from provincial midtown America said 'I'm no celeb, like you,'" Dent said.
As for the latest addition, "chav" is a slightly derogatory term for young men who wear cheap gold jewelry, tracksuits and baseball caps. A mobile phone is never far from their ear.
Dent believes the word was derived from the mid-19th century Romany word chavi, meaning child, by a popular culture Web site in Britain that used its gypsy roots to make a statement on the class level of purported chavs.
"I think it's a really horrible word but it's quite a good example of a word that has burst out on to the scene," she said.
Dent also considers words or terms of the moment that haven't yet made it to the dictionary.
Chief among them is "retrosexual," which predicts a backlash to the suave "metrosexual" man of recent times who uses beauty products and isn't afraid to cry. The scruffy "retrosexual" is a man who spends as little time and money as possible on his appearance.
Other words included "freeganism," a philosophy that promotes getting as much of one's food as possible from free sources and "movieoke," a film variation of karaoke.
Colourful business talk is also chronicled in the book. "Dropping your pants" means lowering the price of a product to close a sale, "moose on the table" is an issue no one wants to address in a meeting, and a "prawn-sandwich man" is a corporate freeloader.
And for those still struggling to work out the title: Larper refers to a Live Action Role Player, or someone who loves acting out fantasy adventures. A Shroomer is a picker or user of wild mushrooms, often of the hallucinogenic variety.