RACHEL BOTSMAN: I always know when a word is having its moment in the sun when big conferences, it becomes the theme at the conference, or I get slightly nervous when you start to see it as the tag line in really big commercial brands because it's a word that's starting to become co-opted and commercialised, because people go, "Oh, it's resonating with a lot of people.” It's not a brand. Trust isn't a brand that you should use. It's a social glue that when it breaks down, it has really huge consequences to our lives. When terms become so broad that they lose their meaning, they become completely diluted. And this is actually my fear around trust right now, is that it's become the word of the moment that is being used in so many different contexts that are we actually diluting something? One of the most important words we have in the human language, that is so fundamental to our relationships, that are we taking the meaning and importance out of it by its overuse?

MEGAN JASPER: I was the lucky recipient of a telephone call from the New York Times in the early 90s when they were writing a huge piece on Seattle, and they wanted to focus on the grunge lexicon. They wanted terms and phrases and words that we all used in the music scene; words and phrases that you would only know if you are part of the Seattle music scene.

HZ: On 15 November 1992, the New York Times printed an article entitled ‘Grunge - A Success Story’, about how grunge had become the latest big thing - ‘from subculture to mass culture’, as the article put it. In the preceding couple of years, the Seattle music scene had been co-opted by the mainstream, and by this point, record labels were putting stickers on album covers saying ‘Seattle’; just a couple of weeks before the NYT article, Marc Jacobs caused a stir in the fashion industry when he showed his grunge collection for Perry Ellis, after which he both won an award and was fired; Vogue printed a ‘Grunge & Glory’ fashion spread; and Kurt Cobain was photographed wearing a T-shirt printed with ‘grunge is dead’, in case you were wondering whether everyone was pleased with all these developments. And chasing the zeitgeist before it dipped below the horizon, there was the New York Times.

“When did grunge become grunge?’ the first paragraph went. “How did a five-letter word meaning dirt, filth, trash become synonymous with a musical genre, a fashion statement, a pop phenomenon?”

Immediately, you notice an error: ‘grunge’ is a six-letter word, not a five-letter word. But that’s just your warm-up error; don’t peak too early.

Read on, and there’s a sidebar entitled “Lexicon of Grunge: Breaking the Code”, “coming soon to a high school or mall near you”. And there followed a list of grunge slang terms.

bloated, big bag of bloatation – drunk
bound-and-hagged – staying home on Friday or Saturday night
harsh realm – bummer
plats – platform shoes
score – great

Not familiar with any of these terms? No. Nor was anybody.

MEGAN JASPER: What they didn't realize is that no such language really existed. And so I decided to have a little bit of fun with it.