Fellow word nerds, the Macquarie’s vote lines are open for 2007’s word of the year. From the list of candidates, it would appear that the nation is catching up…er…falling back into line with the slow concept.

There’s artisan food (made by traditional, often labour-intensive methods and usually in small batches), food miles (a unit of measurement of the distance which a food product has to travel…as a measure of sustainable development), and a slew of ‘carbon’ terms, reflecting the collective consciousness for sustainable living.

And, our favourite, slow travel (1. travel conducted at a slow pace to enjoy more fully the places visited and the people met. 2. such travel seen as environmentally friendly through its lack of reliance on air transport) as an antidote for all those infomaniacs (those given to immediately attending to incoming messages, such as emails, text messages, etc) suffering from password fatigue (a level of frustration reached by having too many different passwords to remember), which contributes to the data smog (electronic information by emails, internet searches, etc, which, by its volume, impairs performance and incurs stress) that descends on our days.