WHEN HIPSTERS RULED : WORLD

A selection of words that you can safely toss out of your vocabulary.

For many people, new year's resolutions entail a clean-out of the cupboard or the basement.

All those once-useful but clapped-out gadgets, outmoded or too-small clothes, the cables to devices long since lost, the book that, once read, will never be opened again - off they go to be recycled.

Like households, language is tidied and renovated, but constantly rather than once a year. Just as you no longer use the chargers for discarded phones, you can safely forget a generation of early tech vocabulary.

Nobody ''instant messages'' anyone anymore; stand alone chat-services have given way to versions integrated into the smartphones or platforms such as Facebook and Slack.

Speaking of Facebook you may not realise that the ''Poke'' and ''Wave'' features still exist, though hardly one uses them, or the attendant terms. 

But technical obsolescence need not dictate the linguistic kind. Computers remind users of their early days every time they ''boot'' them.

Once, computers could not store their own ''operating systems.'' Since it is hard to load software  [including an operating system] without already running software, the clever fixes to this problem were akin to ''pulling yourself up by the bootstraps''.

''Boot'' survived even as computers outgrew this flaw, much as the image of a floppy disk remains the visual embodiment of the ''save'' function.

A common target for a clean-up is the category of ''awesome'' words : brilliant, amazing, epic and their like were all once best in class. They have, through endless use, become dilapidated. They commonly feature on peevers' most-hated-word list, but there is no real reason to bemoan their rise and fall.

Like physical items, terms in frequent use [and people do need to describe awesome and brilliant things] simply wear with repetition. They must be replaced; just as motorists need new tyres every so often, so it is with these words.

Then there is fashion. I every cupboard are a few items which though hardly tattered are hopelessly unwearable, screaming ''2003!'' or thereabouts, to describe straight men who waxed, took expensive care of their hair and so.

''Metrosexual'' faded not mainly because it went out of date, but rather the opposite, because of the success of the underlying concept; even though men started wearing beards and lumberjack shirts, they did so with the exquisite care.

In other words, every man is a metrosexual now, expected to spend time on his grooming. So there is little need for the moniker.

In the same vein, ''hipster'' culture is still dominant, from bare- brick coffee-shops to cocktail bars, that there is scarcely any reason to notice it.

Google searches for the label peaked in America in 2011 and worldwide in 2015.

Picking on hipsters is passe: the photo-blog ''Look At This F...... Hipster'' last posted in 2010.

The honor and serving of the latest operational research on 'World & Wonders', continues. The World Students Society thanks The Economist.