OUGD503 - Roses Awards - Nonversation - How A Word Gets Into The Dictionary

I looked into how words can get into the Oxford dictionary. I found that, historically, a made up word has to be used consistently over a few years in various contexts before it's added to the dictionary. Examples of this are "hobbit" and "quark".

But, more relevantly, I found this passage on the Oxford Dictionary website:

"It used to be the case that a new term had to be used over a period of two or three years before we could consider adding it to a print dictionary. In today's digital age, the situation has changed. New terms can achieve enormous currency with a wide audience in a much shorter space of time, and people expect to find these new 'high-profile' words in their dictionaries. This presents an additional challenge to lexicographers trying to assess whether a term is ephemeral or whether it will become a permanent feature of the language."

What is important here is the "high-profile" part. If a word becomes commonly used or well known or controversial etc etc, then it is high-profile, and because of this, the Oxford Dictionary feels obliged to include it. 

It suggests that my idea of a poster series like the Keep Calm and Carry On isn't really appropriate because it won't attract attention due to the number of posters that rip it off already. The eye and brain will just pass over it.

Something will have to be done in a big scale, which means it needs to be be really cheap to do to make it viable, and it needs to be placed strategically to target people who can recognise such pointless nonversation. 

Given that people say the stupidest things when they're drunk, it seems that the best audience for the message to be put across to would be students. This works on two levels, as you hear a lot of students saying stupid things that they don't realise are stupid because they've never had to look after themselves before.

Given these requirements, posters are the right way to go about things, but a bit bigger than the quite well polished A4/A3's I initially had in mind. The perfect way to go about things seems to be the sort of edgy posters that are plastered over the hexagonal bollards that are scattered around Leeds.

This project is perfect for a twitter handle because of the youthful audience and the speed of which things can spread across social media, so this is something I'll have to incorporate into the posters. Students in Leeds is a big enough demographic to get the twitter handle started, so the print campaign wouldn't even need to be reproduced in any other city, making it even cheaper.