Vape is the new selfie: what the 2014 word of the year says about our times (Steven Poole, The Guardian)

Oxford Dictionaries has crowned ‘vape’ word of the year, with ‘normcore’ and ‘contactless’ as runners-up. But what do these choices tell us about who we are – and where we’re going?

An e-smoker enjoying a good vape … the word ‘sat at at the centre of several rich conversations’ this year, say Oxford Dictionaries. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty.

Lindsay Lohan, Katy Perry, Barry Manilow and Ronnie Wood all do it, and now it’s Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year. Vape: to suck on an electronic cigarette. If you vape, you are a “vaper” (for obvious reasons, no one thought “vapist” was a good idea); and the act of doing so – perhaps in a “vaporium” – is “vaping”. (In fact, “vaping” was coined as long ago as 1983, when such devices were as yet a pipe-dream.)

10 of the worst examples of management-speak (Steven Poole, The Guardian)

Only if you have the core competencies will you be able to action the key deliverables … Steven Poole drills down into the strangled vocabulary of office jargon.

Working on the deliverables … Kevin Costner in The Postman Channel 5.

Among the most spirit-sapping indignities of office life is the relentless battering of workers’ ears by the strangled vocabulary of management-speak. It might even seem to some innocent souls as though all you need to do to acquire a high-level job is to learn its stultifying jargon. Bureaucratese is a maddeningly viral kind of Unspeak engineered to deflect blame, complicate simple ideas, obscure problems, and perpetuate power relations. Here are some of its most dismaying manifestations.