WHEN celebrities were few, just one word, paparazzi was enough to describe freelance photographers who hounded celebrities to take candid pictures to sell to newspapers and magazines. The singular of paparazzi is paparazzo, a word that became associated with annoying celebrity photographers after Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita or The Good Life, in which there was a street photographer named Signor Paparazzo. In Italian, paparazzo means ‘buzzing insect’. This one word has created a string of derivatives. There is rumorazzi that refers to the writers of industry gossip columns. Snaparazzo labels the amateur photographer who pursues celebrities to take their pictures. This word combines snapshot and its connotations of amateur photography with paparazzi. The surfeit of information and input has created another word for the whole process: paparazzification, the act or process of trivialising.

Celebrity comes from the Latin celebr, which means frequented or honoured. Celebrate, celebrant and celebration come from the same root. Celebrity got shortened to celeb in the early twentieth century. As an independent word, celeb has moved beyond the original noun, celebrity. Today, celeb is used as a verb to show the attendance of a large number of celebrities. "We had our annual Man of the Year party at the Opera House in London's Covent Garden about three years ago. It was really celebed up. There was designer Tom Ford and Paul McCartney, lots of people, a brilliant evening," writes Catherine Jones (Interview: Dylan Jones, The Western Mail, March 15, 2003). If a celebrity uses celebrity status to promote a product or cause, celeb can be used as a verb to describe the act and the cause becomes a celeb cause, making celeb an adjective. This support becomes celebrity advocacy. The person who negotiates with a celebrity’s agent, manager or publicist to ensure the star’s attendance at a social event is called a celebrity wrangler. Celeb has also created celebriphilia, an intense, abnormal desire to have a romantic relationship with a celebrity. The real life of a celebrity in a TV show format in which one or more celebrities participate in real-life situations has spawned the word celebreality.

Celebing has combined with the Cockney (East London) dialect of English to produce a new version of slang. In Cockney rhyming slang, objects or actions are represented by words or phrases that rhyme with the names of those objects or actions. For example, stairs are dancing bears, road is frog and toad and queer is ginger beer. Many of the slang terms are celebrity names: trouble is Barney Rubble; pain is Frasier Crane and belch is Raquel Welch. So celebing, in this sense, means sending someone a picture of the celebrity whose name is used as a rhyming slang term. "In the UK, ‘celebing’ has taken off as a sort of slang messaging. Instead of sending someone the message ‘Fancy a beer?’ on their mobile or — heaven forbid — calling and asking, people are sending pictures of Britney Spears," writes Sharon Pian Chan (Iraq War barely registers at Convention, The Seattle Times, March 19, 2003).

While on the subject of important people, the Hindi varishth did not mean ‘important’ in its original context in Sanskrit. Varishth meant ‘most broad, spread-out or biggest or meanest’ and this sense can be seen in the Vedic literature of the time as well. In Hindi, varishth has shrunk to senior or important alone. The superlative degree has vanished, retaining the figurative sense of big alone.

This feature was published on January 31, 2004