New words often disappear before they have a chance of making it into the
mainstream dictionaries. But you can easily keep up with the pace of linguistic
development with Michael Quinion’s excellent World Wide Words site
(http://www.quinion.demon.co.uk/words), which neatly fills the gap.
Among the entries are “prebuttal”—an electioneering term that means
getting your retaliation in first—and “Cool Britannia”, the buzz phrase
that the modernising Labour government is using to repackage the nation’s image.
The Tories’ idea of the national image was to refer to “Great Britain PLC”.
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