Name: Hepeating.
Age: Getting on for five years old.
First use: The term was coined by friends of the US physics professor and astronomer Nicole Gugliucci, who announced it to the world in a tweet on 22 September 2017.
And what does it mean? Well, the hepeat is just the latest in the expanding list of terms for sexist male behaviour, a glossary that began with mansplaining …
Which I can tell you is the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner that is seen to be condescending or patronising. Did that make sense, love? Thank you for illustrating “manterrupt” at the same time.
And now for my manologue … No, no! That won’t be necessary. I’m sure everyone knows about that already, and if they don’t it’s pretty obvious.
OK then, back to hepeat and that original tweet from Prof Gugliucci. “My friends coined a word: hepeated. For when a woman suggests an idea and it’s ignored, but then a guy says the same thing and everyone loves it,” she announced.
Did she provide any tips for usage? She gave a couple of examples: “Ugh! I got hepeated in that meeting again,” or “He totally hepeated me!”
And it’s caught on? The concept was immediately recognised. Gugliucci’s original tweet got 185k likes and 58.8k retweets.
Shetweets? Hetweets too; #NotAllMen etc.
Has it made it into the dictionary? The OED hasn’t included it. Yet. But the term has just been introduced into an internal handbook for the staff of the exam regulator Ofqual, where hepeating is described as “a situation where a man repeats a woman’s comments or ideas and then is praised for them as if they were his own”.
I’d really love to know what, for example, the (male) historian Jeremy Black thinks of the term. He’s not a massive fan. It’s an “ugly new made-up word that’s foolish and devoid of meaning”, he told the Mail on Sunday. He went on to say that it “should play no role in educational advice”.
So who does think it’s an actual thing, then? Any woman who has been in a meeting, or at work, or indeed anywhere with men.
Don’t say: “Wouldn’t ‘hejack’ be a better word?”
Do say: “Shut up – no one asked you.”