CorpComms Magazine

Contributors to the latest edition of the Collins English Dictionary include PM David Cameron, his deputy Nick Clegg and Aleksandr the Meerkat from price comparison site Compare the Market, who offered his heavily Russian-accented catchphrase 'Simples!' to the tome.

The election has left its mark on our linguistic landscape, with 'bigotgate' - the label immortalising former PM Gordon Brown's unfortunate encounter with Rochdale Labour supporter Gillian Duffy, 'Cleggmania', describing the hype around the now Deputy Prime Minister's performance in the televised leaders' debates, and the Conservative electoral slogan 'broken society' all earning entries.

Twitter has populated the reference book with a new micro-language, making room for 'retweet', sharing messages and links on the microblogging forum, 'tweetheart', denoting a person idolised by fellow twitterers, and even 'tweet tooth', meaning 'a strong desire to send a tweet'.

Popular television and celebrity trends have also wormed their way into the lexical establishment, with 'BGT', acronym for Britain's Got Talent, and 'fauxmance', describing 'a fictitious romance between two celebrities, concocted in order to gain press coverage' also making their philological debuts.

The recession has unsurprisingly seen the coinage of a number of pop economic terms, such as 'funemployment', describing the joys of an unexpected break from work, 'PIIGS', an acronym for Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain - the countries most at risk from the 2010 Euro Crisis, and 'ghost estate', referring to a house built during the boom but now lying empty.

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