Last year, Oxford Languages’ word of the year was goblin mode. Apparently 300,000 voters decided upon it, but I haven’t heard anyone use it.

It rocketed into view after someone posted online a fake headline about the break-up of Julia Fox and Kanye West after a month together. ‘He didn’t like when I went goblin mode,’ it read. Fox later made it clear she had said nothing of the kind.

It means ‘self-indulgent, lazy, or greedy behaviour that rejects social norms’. I suspect goblin mode is a vogue term that will disperse like the morning mist.

Talking of mist, vape has made another advance in establishing itself in the language. The Local Government Association has called for disposable vapes to be banned by next year. Here vape means the little machines used for vaping. Vaping has been in use since 1980, first for inhalation of nicotine vapour from a cigarette-shaped tube, and from 1998 for inhaling vapour generated by heating a liquid. Scientists like to insist that steam is colourless, but ordinary English-speakers call water vapour steam, and call the formation of condensation (on car windows, for example) steaming up. They also speak of hot food smoking when it gives off water vapour.

Smoke and vapour were conflated by King James I in his Counterblaste to Tobacco while arguing that smoking produced the very symptom its defenders claimed it relieved: phlegm. ‘Even as the smoakie vapours sucked up by the Sunne, and staied in the lowest and colde Region of the ayre, are there contracted into cloudes and turned into raine and such other watery Meteors: so this stinking smoake being sucked up by the Nose, and imprisoned in the colde and moyst braines, is by their colde and wett facultie, turned and cast foorth againe in waterie distillations, and so are you made free and purged of nothing.’ King James would see in vaping a confirmation of the theory that he embraced regarding cold and wet humours.