If, like me, you are regularly incensed by the mangling of language then you will, like me, greet with much fear and trepidation the news that a bunch of new buzzwords has arrived.

I’ve only JUST got used to bogus, sweet and awesome (cue much rolling of eyes from the 13-year-old) and now 2017 has thrown up a whole pile of even more confusing ones.

There’s ‘ship’ – as in, short for relationship. It describes fans’ approval of fictional or character romances on TV and film.

As in, ‘They’re so cute together, I totally ship them.”

(Yeah, me neither.)

There’s FR, much simpler to follow – it’s short for ‘For Real’ and you use it when you are agreeing with what someone has just said. For example: Me: “I’m totally loving all the new box sets on Netflix right now.” You: “FR.”

I like ‘low key’, which is when you are talking about something you don’t want everyone to know about.

For example: “I low key tripped walking into Marks and Spencer today.”

(Admittedly, that’s probably not something anyone under the age of 40 would actually say.)

The opposite – ‘high key’ can be used when you LOVE something. “High key love Craig David’s new song”, for instance, though there’s another really unlikely saying in my house, at any rate.

Some words have simply been updated, for the new millennials, from previous incarnations – for example, ‘aesthetic’ is the new ‘vibe’ – more edgy, less 70s groovy – as in “I’m obsessed with Kim K’s new Insta aesthetic” - and ‘calm’ is the new ‘sweet’, as in “Shall we split the bill?” “No, it’s calm.”

And then there’s woke, which is so popular, apparently, it was even chosen by Oxford Dictionaries as one of the words of 2016. Essentially, the more ‘woke’ someone is, the more they understand about a topic or a person. It is most often used to describe a man who is also a feminist as in, “Love hearing Daniel Radcliffe praise the HeForShe campaign, he is so woke.”

These are just some of the best buzzwords for 2017, published by translation service LanguageLine, so consider this a helpful introduction into working out what on earth your teenager is talking about.

But actually, buzzwords are good – they’re a sign of the times, an interesting insight into how language evolves with every generation of young people searching for its own identity.

What’s less appealing is corporate buzzwording – mystifying business speak, for example, like ‘nowcasting’ – a bit like forecasting, but more about the ‘now’ than the ‘future’; or ‘datafication’, the art of collecting data and using it to predict or shape behaviour (a bit like obsessing over your FitBit and promising yourself it will make you do more exercise).

It’s a short hop from using confusing language to bamboozle people or to make yourself sound important, to spouting ‘alternative facts’ – just look at what’s happening on the other side of the Atlantic and be afraid, be very afraid.

If you have ever sat in a meeting and wanted to bash your head off the table when someone uttered the words ‘low-hanging fruit’ or ‘thoughtshowers’ (the new brainstorm, fyi) or, God forbid, ‘multi-channel game-changer’, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

FR.