Who said amazeballs

That people get so worked up over something so harmless is what amazifies me. Stan Carey is a freelance editor, proofreader and writer from the west of Ireland. He tweets at StanCarey. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Check your privilege and know thy selfie. But it was fun for me, too! Confronted with the two sentences above in print or conversation, would you wince with distain at the choice of the highlighted adjective, or applaud the user as someone fashionably au fait with popular language?

Whether you view the word amazeballs as dire or de rigueur , its meaning is undoubtedly transparent, and if you're regularly exposed to popular English media, then there's a strong chance you'll have come across it in recent months. Though English is a language rich in synonymy and has a whole raft of adjectives designed to show enthusiastic approval of something — think amazing , fabulous , fantastic , gorgeous , lovely , wonderful , breathtaking , sensational , phenomenal … and that's only just the tip of the iceberg — it seems there's a perpetual desire to come up with something catchy and new, and one of the most recent kids on the block is this rather bizarre adaptation of the adjective amazing into amazeballs.

Though initially mainly used by bloggers and social media aficionados under a certain age, its journey into more widespread recognition was assisted considerably by the concept of crowdsourcing by dictionary publishers. Macmillan's very own Open Dictionary is a great example of this data collection technique, in which members of the public are invited to become 'word-spotters' and suggest new and emerging words for potential inclusion. Amazeballs , it seems, has cropped up sufficiently for some publishers to consider it worth recording.

It transpires however that this expression is a great example of how, just occasionally, a new word comes along and sparks a high-profile ripple of dislike amongst language users, whether professional writers or day-to-day bloggers. Generally defined as 'an enthusiastic expression of approval', amazeballs has fuelled such a wave of derisive comment that it's also been given the tongue-in-cheek alternative definition 'an exclamation inviting someone to hit you'.

I'll leave you to decide. All I can say is that, if people are still using it in ten years' time, then that would be, to my mind, totally amazeballs ….

Her bag of verbal irritants included YOLO, adorkable, mommy porn and zombie apocalypse. But towering above all these was "amazeballs. Or perhaps some other type of balls, made of amazing?

Do amazeballs really exist? In September , amazeballs rolled into the Collins Online Dictionary, with the definition "an expression of enthusiastic approval. Being so awesome that a regular word can't describe you. It appeared on PerezHilton. The comedy duo Jessica and Hunter posted a YouTube video claiming that they had invented the term. They're both wrong. The originator of the term appears to be fashion blogger Elizabeth Spiridakis, who's said the word simply came out of shorthand she made up with her magazine friends.

Katy Perry and Kate Walsh, among others, began to appropriate amazeballs for their own ends. A recipe materialized. In a crowning moment for the neologism, Gwyneth Paltrow referred to one character's rendition of the Aretha Franklin hit "Ain't No Way" as "amazeballs" on "Glee. In November of last year, amazeballs racked up a more dubious honor. It was added to the Dictionary of the Most Annoying Words in the English Language, where it was defined as "an exclamation inviting someone to hit you.