When in 2019 Jacob Rees-Mogg reclined languidly on a green bench of the Commons, like a would-be Fred Burnaby on his sofa in the Tissot portrait, it riled some of the Opposition. He was, Anna Turley, the Labour MP, said, the ‘physical embodiment of arrogance, entitlement, disrespect and contempt for our parliament’. So was he Mogging?

Mogging, meaning ‘the act of outshining or outperforming someone’, is Collins’s Word of the Year. Collins’s runners-up included bixie, friendslop and carspreading. If you used bixie in speech, people might think you were saying pixie, and it is indeed a portmanteau word for a hairstyle between a pixie and a bob. Friendslop, a pejorative term among gamers, suffers the same aural identity crisis. And I thought carspreading might be the way people sit in cars, whereas it denotes the growing size of cars themselves.

Mogging is said to have developed in the so-called bodybuilding culture or gym community. These worlds, insofar as they exist, certainly do not overlap with that of my husband or millions like him. Mogging grew popular among people who take notice of Clavicular, the nickname of Braden Eric Peters, a 20-year-old online ‘influencer’ who embodies looksmaxxing – taking extreme measures to increase supposed physical attractiveness. I suppose he had the ideal collar-bone or clavicle.

The etymology of mogging is said to be from amog, an acronym for alpha male of the group. But acronyms are rarely the origin of common words. The saving aspect of mogging is that Gen Alpha (born from the 2010s onwards) use it with implicit humour. They may pout or gesture towards imaginary chiselled jaws when pronouncing it. 

Funnily enough, mog has been nestling in the dictionary all along. It has been used for more than 200 years to mean ‘move on’, often with ‘off’: mog off as an imperative is a set collocation. The Oxford English Dictionary does not know its origin. There is no such mystery about the word for a cat, moggy or mog. It comes from the Christian name Margaret. So, a little more surprisingly, does the surname Mogg, Rees or otherwise.