'Tis the season to make awkward small talk with people you have not seen since this time last year. But, how do you show that you have been super switched on throughout 2016?
You could spend the time from now until Christmas lunch binge-watching Stranger Things and The OA on Netflix. You could find the Holy Grail of a Trump/Brexit take your captive audience hasn't already read, better expressed, 23 times before.
!["How do you do, fellow kids?" This could be you on Christmas day, if you play your cards right.](/web/20161223141823im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/g/j/t/1/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gte2so.png/1482435380093.jpg)
Or you could just learn some groovy new slang, and impress your family by translating what your 15-year-old cousin is saying.
The year that was has brought an abundance of new words into mainstream use. Here are five you can drop this Christmas.
1. Woke (adj.)
To be "woke" is to be enlightened with left-wing politics and awareness, particularly of racism, although also of sexism, homophobia and classism. It is used as a positive attribute (the New York Times has described it as kind of a counter-term for the right's taunt of "political correctness"). "Not woke" is the negative conjugation; "woker" and "wokest" are the comparative and superlative, respectively.
Approaching your eighth year of boycotting Chris Brown music? That's woke. Dressed up as a geisha for a costume party? That's not woke.
The irony in all of this is that the term "woke" originally came from black activist social media circles: the phrase "stay woke" was popular during the Black Lives Matter movement. So, if you think about it, a woke take could be that the increasingly broad use of the word "woke" itself is kind of appropriative.
And... that's not woke.
2. Cuck (n.)
There was a stage in my 2016 where I thought the word "cuck" was just an Ermagherd-esque way of spelling the word "cock". This was wrong, and I apologise to all those who knew me during that dark period.
Cuck, a term used as an insult by the Alt-right (the "alternative" conservatives best known for their support of Donald Trump, keep up), is actually short for "cuckold" i.e. that old school term for a man whose wife has sex with someone else. You probably giggled about it in Year 10 English. Because nothing says "my political opinions have relevance in the 21st century" quite like co-opting your slang from Shakespeare.
Of course, now it can now just be used as an insult by anyone of any political persuasion. Mainly because it sounds like "cock".
3. Lit (adj.)
The word "lit" is all about context.
Of course, if it's being used by your 19-year-old cousin, as he steps back inside, putting a lighter back in his pocket, staring dreamily around at a now much more tolerable family function, we all know what it means.
But, over the past couple of years, what can be "lit" has broadened substantially and now it can mean "pumping" ("This party is lit!") or, frankly, often just "good" ("This shortbread is lit!").
So, if the word is coming out of your 10-year-old niece, chances are some teenage boy you've never heard of has uploaded a new Christmas YouTube video with one of the girls from Dance Moms, or something.
4. Fam (n.)
2015 had squad, 2016 has fam. Obviously derived from "family", but able to encompass any and all of your mates, regardless of what's on your birth certificate.
5. And, for when you're sitting with the grownups... Post-truth (adj.)
"Post-truth" was named the Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2016 ("woke" and "alt-right" made the shortlist).
It is an adjective, defined by the dictionary as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief".
Although it has been floating around for over two decades (the Oxford Dictionary traces it back to a 1992 essay on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War), the word's popularity soared this year with events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump being described as part of an era of "post-truth politics".