One day in September 2002, someone posted a photograph of his mouth on an Australian online forum. He wrote: “Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps…. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”
Oxford Dictionaries makes this the first recorded use of “selfie”. That word (usual meaning: “self-portrait taken on a smartphone”) is now penetrating language after language. Chosen as Oxford’s English word of the year in 2013, selfie has since triumphed in the Netherlands, France and Italy, and was recently named Austrian “youth word of the year”. “Selfie” has even inspired a family of words, including “belfie” (portrait of one’s own backside), “shelfie” (portrait of bookcase), and “nelfie” (a naked selfie, sometimes communicated through sexting, ie sexual texting, though sadly not often in my circles).
This is the season when many countries choose their words of the year. My conclusion from the cumulative evidence: language, driven by social media and texting, is renewing itself faster than ever. Sometimes it’s even abandoning the alphabet. A global tech-based language is emerging.