I occasionally review the newspapers on BBC Radio Cornwall’s breakfast show. I’m not at my best early doors, so I set three alarms the night before, in different parts of the room, and wake up several times throughout the night in fear of having five minutes to get up and out. 

Once in front of the mic, I tend to stick to funnies and shorts, which is all my brain can take on minimal coffee. My last appearance coincided with news that amusement arcade trade organisations were worried about the Royal Mint dropping coppers, which are the mainstay of their “tipping point” machines. 

My eye also alighted on a story about 3,200 new words and phrases added to the Cambridge Dictionary in 2024. These included "the ick", as heard on reality show Love Island - "a sudden feeling you dislike someone because of something they do"; and "boop" – a gentle touch on the nose or head to indicate affection.

Further examples are "IYKYK" - an abbreviation for "if you know, you know"; and "chef's kiss", when you put your fingers and thumb together and kiss them to describe something perfect or excellent.

These latest additions are influenced by online and youth culture and are expected to have "staying power" in the ever-evolving English language.

It won’t surprise you, given my job, that I love words and phrases. I resist the temptation to decry any change as decay – while I can’t bear the fact that people increasingly say and write “could of, would of etc.”, I’m aware that future generations will forget why it’s wrong, as they have throughout the centuries.

When conversing idly with Daughter, I find myself stopping to ask: “Do you know what that phrase means?” French biscuit brand LU found that 61% of Gen Z-ers admit to not understanding quirky English names and phrases. 

TV presenter Fred Sirieix took to the streets of London to canvas unsuspecting Brits. (Mum-crush alert: Fred Sirieix can ask me anything he likes. Daughter says: “Ewwwwww!”)

A dime a dozen, raining cats and dogs, cat got your tongue, bite the bullet and easy as pie were voted the most confusing English turns of phrase, while topping the list of misleading misnomers are tennis bracelet, herringbone, koala bear, gravy boat and earwig.

What the hell is a tennis bracelet, I ask myself or, more accurately, Google? It turns out it’s named after an incident when tennis player Chris Evert's bracelet broke during a match at the 1978 US Open, causing the game to be paused while she collected the diamonds. Anyone can wear one – the tennis is optional. 

And in food terms, Cornwall’s own Stargazy Pie baffled a quarter of respondents (but not as many as spotted dick).

Meanwhile, broadcaster and wordsmith Gyles Brandreth has launched the Misheard Manifesto in a bid to correct common mishearings of well-known sayings. People from Launceston to Land’s End are entreated to banish ‘wriggle room’, ‘escape goat’, ‘damp squid’, ‘tenderhooks’, ‘nip in the butt’, and all the other incorrect phrases that friends and family are just too polite to tell you are wrong. 

I have just looked up “wriggle room”. Apparently it should be “wiggle”. I am now struggling to say which I would have said before absorbing this information, as both make perfect sense. Which leads me to ask: does it really matter? 

Well, maybe. Misheard sayings - officially known as ‘eggcorns’ – are rife, and a quarter of us find them irritating or annoying. 

Gyles is working with Specsavers, who blame this phenomenon on poor hearing and suggest you visit their audiology department. But surely the bigger culprit is ignorance, and the embarrassment of potentially offending someone by pointing out their mistake (almost half of us wouldn’t)?

I’m no different. My particular bugbear is “pacific” for “specific”, but I would sooner suffer/seethe in silence than call someone out on it.

In discussing these phrases, Daughter and I had a bit of a disagreement. Gen-Zed or Gen-Zee? “No one calls it Gen-Zed,” she said. “Can’t call it Gen-Zee,” said me. 

It turns out there’s a whole new lexicon I know nothing about. A 'snack' is no longer a nice but possibly unhealthy thing to eat between meals, but an attractive person. Global clothing retailer Zara recently pulled a T-shirt from its children’s section after a Kent mum complained its slogans, depicting two strawberries as “the perfect summer snack” and suggesting viewers “take a bite”, were “vile” and inappropriate. 

Meanwhile, more than 38 million people have subscribed to Skibidi Toilet, a series about terrifying animated heads that live in, you guessed it, toilets. Daughter complains that her male classmates are always on about it, making them even more annoying than they already were. 

Back to goats, GOAT - an acronym for “greatest of all time” - is now a verb: you can be “goated”. This surely deserves a "chef's kiss".