I’m always uplifted by the advent of new dating vocabulary. Perhaps slightly strangely so, as it generally captures the less appealing aspects of human nature and behaviour rather than our better angels, but the joy of being able to nail something down by naming it outweighs all else.

In my day, we had to make do with the umbrella term of simply ‘being a shit’. It got the message across, but it was too loose to bring real satisfaction. You could occasionally narrow it down – ‘breadcrumbing’ was ‘stringing someone along’, for example – but the old term is neither as succinct, nor does it quite capture the deliberateness of the action.

Naming and shaming particular actions with particular terms is much better than the broad-brush approach. It gives you greater ownership of the experience and more power over it; specifically, the power to recognise it as the work of a certain type of shit, retrofit the warning signs and avoid them in the future. And new words make us look anew at old behaviours and help us avoid unconsciously accepting them as normal practice. It renders them not worthy of mention, their calling out replaced by an eye-roll and a shrug, the silent, “Eh, whatcha gonna do?”

Breadcrumbing, ghosting, throning: Lucy Mangan explains why she’s all for inventing new words