Earlier in March, the British poet Brian Bilston published a new piece on Twitter. Entitled Meaningful Vote, it ends with the lines “How foolish, it seems/How senseless, absurd/To redefine a nation/In pursuit of a word”. ‘Brexit’ has quickly shot into everyday use – as inevitable in British conversations as ‘sorry’ or commentary on the weather. For those who aren’t yet Brexhausted, there are some interesting parallels between ‘Brexit’ (the word) and Brexit (the political phenomenon).
It might seem a long time ago now, but Brexit was preceded by Grexit. A pair of Citigroup economists first used the term ‘Grexit’ in February 2012, to refer to the possibility of Greece leaving the eurozone. Three months later, Peter Wilding coined ‘Brexit’, describing it as ‘another sad word’, in a think-tank article. Wilding, a solicitor, worked on EU policy and media for the Conservative Party under David Cameron. He’s a Remainer who thinks that the catchiness of ‘Brexit’ helped the Leave campaign, and thus now regrets creating the word. This may be the original Bregret.
An additional irony is that ‘Brexit’ has become a rallying cry for those who want a more distant relationship with Europe, when the word ‘exit’ is a borrowing from Latin. “Because of the word itself, we have been painted into a corner,” argues Cardiff University linguist Lise Fontaine. “By accepting this term, by repeating it, by making it so frequent that it comes out automatically, we have closed down alternative perspectives and ideas about ending the UK’s membership with the European Union.” These alternative perspectives might have included more attention from the outset to Northern Ireland, which is of course part of the UK but strictly speaking not part of Britain (the large island of England, Wales and Scotland).
Fontaine’s research into the semantics of ‘Brexit’ shows that after a brief flirtation with the ‘Brixit’ spelling, ‘Brexit’ became standard. But in the early days ‘Brexit’ was marked with quotation marks, boldface, definitions, and terms like ‘so-called’—showing that even with a standardised spelling, the term’s usage hadn’t become fully normalised.
Indeed, ‘Brexit’ didn’t take off for several years, until the lead-up to the 2015 general election in the UK. One of Cameron’s campaign pledges was for a renegotiation of the British relationship with the EU. It was from this period, and especially following the announcement of the referendum, that ‘Brexit’ exploded. Fontaine recalls suddenly hearing the term everywhere in cabs and pubs. In 2016 Collins Dictionary named it the word of the year. By the end of 2016 it was a global word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has also noted related coinages like ‘Brexit dividend’.
In addition to the flourishing of new terms, Brexit has brought certain words into new or changed prominence. ‘Unicorn’ has become a term used to discredit ‘unrealistic’ Brexiteers, with the European Council president Donald Tusk sharing a letter from a six-year-old featuring a drawing of the mystical creature. ‘Backstop’ is another example. Until late 2017, web search results for ‘backstop’ were dominated by sports fans or finance experts. It’s since become synonymous with the open border between Ireland and Northern Ireland – a sticking point in the Brexit negotiations.
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