WORDS faithfully mirror social trends. Here are a few such reflectors. A leather spinster is a heterosexual or asexual woman who is happily unmarried and has no desire to seek a mate. This word originated when English, a 32-year-old financing consultant, began interviewing unmarried women for her book, Leather Spinsters and their Degrees of Asexuality. The term leather spinsters was first used in the late 1980s by successful American career women who didn’t feel the urge or need to add marriage to their lives. At first, it was used as a shock tool against nagging family members whose sole purpose was to pressure them into conformity. Later the term was used as a label for an unmarried and happy way of life, thus dispelling any myths of their being abnormal or living as embittered and sullen women no men wanted as wives.

Recently, newspapers have been quite busy determining who is a cam girl and who is not a cam girl. Quite latest in terms of coinage, a cam girl or a Web cam girl is the young woman who broadcasts live pictures of herself over the World Wide Web. In India, so far the cam girl and cam boy have remained restricted to MMS cell phones or video CDs but there has been an online explosion in the number of personal Web cam sites. Most of these cam girl sites feature live cameras or digital shots, links to other places on the Internet, diary entries and biographical information.

In 1952 appeared the word one-upmanship, recording faithfully the dawn of cutthroat competition. In a gender-sensitive world, one-up-person ship was not too far behind with the meaning of the original word preserved: ‘the practice of one person trying to do better than or to prove themselves superior to another person.’ But, this was not enough for the language users who were compelled to acknowledge the increasingly active role women play in the world today, so along came one-up-woman ship — the practice of one woman trying to do better than or to prove herself superior to another woman.

This feature was published on January 15, 2004