IF you don’t mind, I’d like to have a little word with you. Drumble perhaps. Or handsy. Or what about fo’shizzle?

Not sure what I’m on about?

Well you should try to pay more attention because all of the above are hot off the press, being three out of the 500 new words that have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Don’t beat yourself up about it for too long, though, because I’d never heard of them either.

Nor has my daughter, who is 20 and therefore knows lots of stuff that is way beyond my capabilities, like how to operate a smartphone with just her thumbs.

When I read her a list of the new words, even she hadn’t heard of many of them before, save for one or two fashion-related inventions, such as ‘jeggings’ (a combination of jeans and leggings).

I’m also willing to bet – although I haven’t actually checked this - that my wife’s Auntie Jean, who is in her nineties, hasn’t heard many of these new words before, either.

So my question to you is: if I haven’t heard them, my daughter hasn’t heard them, our aged aunt hasn’t heard them, and neither have most of the people reading this, then who has?

And what’s the point of filling the dictionary with hopelessly obscure words that nobody will ever use unless it’s their go at Scrabble and they are getting desperate?

I am reminded of that excellent episode of Blackadder in which Samuel Johnson claims his new dictionary contains every word in the English language, only for Blackadder to offer his enthusiastic contrafribularities and then apologise for being anispeptic, frasmotic and even compunctuous to have caused such pericombobulation.

If you are as old as me, you’ll also remember the late, great Stanley Unwin, (oh yes, deep joy). It’s thanks to him that we have a clear understanding of the tricky theory of nuclear physics, or as he put it: “The calculodes of the incubus soon send the pi-R-squared up the polly.”

We are also indebted to Lewis Carroll for telling us about the Jaberwocky. By all accounts, “’twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”

So there is a long history of clever people inventing new words and failing to get them in the dictionary, but all you have to do, today, it seems, is come up with a word and get half a dozen of your mates to repeat it within earshot of a lexicographer in Oxford – then you’re in.

Once upon a time, your name had to be William Shakespeare before they would take you so seriously as a word inventor.

He is credited with making up hundreds of words and phrases, and good ones too, including eyeball, arouse, remorseless, zany, grovel, obscene, plus countless others that we still use every day, more than four centuries later.

Compare those with the new ones, which, if you have even heard them at all will be forgotten before the year is out. I’m thinking of the likes of comedize, staycation and interleading.

But worst of all are those on the list that I would never stoop so low to employ: buko (much), comix (adult comics), go-juice (your first cup of tea or coffee in the morning), on-trend (fashionable) and – worst of all - hard arse (a word that describes somebody who rigorously enforces standards, ironically coined by somebody who doesn’t understand what we mean when we say ‘standards’).

Rest assured that none of the above will ever darken this column again.

And on that I give you my word.