‘Do you know what vibe coding is, darling?’ I asked my husband.

‘What do you take me for?’ he replied.

‘Or 67?’

‘Ah, I do know that the Prime Minister had to apologise for leading a classroom of little children in a series of hand moves to that one. But I’ve no idea what it means.’

Thus was my suspicion confirmed that most ‘words of the year’ are far from general concern. Vibe coding, some sort of AI software development, is Collins Dictionary’s new Word of the Year; 67 (pronounced ‘six seven’), which has no agreed meaning, is Dictionary.com’s.

To me, a far more interesting word is fudge. It is not new, but its entry in the Oxford English Dictionary was revised this year. The fudge we might get in a Christmas stocking or bring back from holiday is not the original meaning of the word.

The first sign of the confectionery was in some US women’s colleges in the 1880s. ‘I secured the recipe and in my first year at Vassar [College] I made it there,’ remembered an alumna in 1921, quoted in Oh, Fudge! (1990) by Lee Edwards Benning. Early references call the sweets fudges, and there was always a tendency in America to include chocolate.

‘What was the original motivation for this use of the word? asks Peter Gilliver, OED executive editor in a review of the year’s developments. ‘There I am, to be honest, stumped.’

The meaning of fudge 180 years earlier had been ‘a made-up story, a deception’. It covered some of the field of the later spoof. Both also meant ‘nonsense, rubbish, drivel’. There is always call for words to mean that.

By the late 18th century to fudge could mean to cobble together, patch up, improvise, like the older botch. Today the favourite flavour of fudge is political. Dr David Owen, in a speech in the House on 2 October 1980 shortly before the foundation of the SDP, came up with a memorable doublet: ‘We are fed up with fudging and mudging, with mush and slush.’ But ministers are still at the ready with the hot fudge sauce jug.