Sideswipe: November 2: Keeping up with the lingo

Fluffernutters make us feel hygge, but TBH they're giving us dad bods. If that sentence didn't make sense to you — worry not, as definitions for most of these terms can now be looked up in the dictionary. Merriam-Webster has added 455 new words to the dictionary. The global pandemic is a theme with definitions for "super-spreader", "long Covid" and "vaccine passports". Tech-related words such as "teraflop" which is a unit of measure for the calculating speed of a computer equal to one trillion floating-point operations per second, was also added. New words that entered political discourse this year include "astroturf" which is used to describe a movement that is falsely made to appear "grassroots". The term, borrowed from artificial turf, is used to describe political efforts, campaigns, or organisations that appear to be funded and run by ordinary people but are in fact backed by powerful groups. Culinary terms were also added, including a definition for a "fluffernutter", which is a sandwich made with peanut butter and marshmallow crème between two slices of white bread. The dictionary previously updated its content in January, including words such as "silver fox", an attractive middle-aged man having mostly grey or white hair, and "hygge", a cosy quality that makes a person feel content and comfortable.

Parenting according to Twitter

"Playing board games with your kids and deliberately trying to lose so it ends quicker is a parenting art form."

"Sorry I never responded to the text you sent; my 5-year-old just finished telling me a story that started on Friday."

"I let my toddler play with my phone today so now everything is in Spanish and I have 273 pictures of her left hand."

"I'm not saying my husband and I are scared of our teen daughter but we just rock-paper-scissored to see who has to wake her up."

"My children wish to inform you they will be deceased from hunger before dinner if they do not have a second after-school snack."

This is not eco-cred ...

Rich people be like ...

"I live near a company that builds yachts," a Redditor writes. "One day there was an odd-looking yacht. A crew member explained to me that was a 'shadow yacht'. You see, when you get hyper rich and have multiple yachts. You wouldn't want to ruin the aesthetic of your nice yachts with jet skis and helicopters. Nor would you want your crew to sleep on the nice yacht. So you buy a shadow yacht to store your toys and to house your crew. This shadow yacht follows your fleet of nice yachts around.

Old school inappropriateness

"Not all teachers were mean in the old days," writes Anne Martin of Helensville. "When leaving primary school we asked our teachers to write in our autograph books. My teacher – a young, fun male - wrote with a grin: 'Never make love in a cornfield, remember corn has ears.' My parents thought it was hilarious but I bet he wouldn't get away with it in these 'enlightened' days."