THE latest issue of the Collins Gem English Dictionary has just landed on my desk; not lobbed there by an irate colleague, you understand, but sent through the post by its publishers in the hope that I might write about it.

It's a volume that takes me instantly back to my schooldays, when a well-thumbed copy of the little blue book travelled everywhere with me to guard against spelling misdemeanours.

That book looked very different from the blue and silver plastic-coated volume Collins has now sent me, along with a press release to point out the new words that have made their way into its columns for 2004.

Surprisingly, from a personal point of view, the phrases 'I luv Scozza' and 'Donny is Ace' are nowhere to be found within the latest edition, although I could swear they had found their way between the covers of my 1975 Collins Gem.

While my contributions have clearly failed to make the grade, Collins' press release informs me of terms that did succeed in getting into the dictionary way back then. The Seventies gave our language streaking, space invaders and the Rubik cube. Glad to see my teenage years weren't a complete waste.

We were still having fun in the hedonistic Eighties, which gave us yuppies, wine bars and lager louts, but we had somehow become computer nerds by the Nineties, a decade which spawned terms such as the Internet, 'text messaging', 'web', 'surf' and 'hit'.

The new Millennium has not brought a return to jollity, if the little dictionary is anything to go by.

On the contrary, it has brought us obsessions with work, stress and boredom. According to Collins, we busy workers now eat 'deskfast', not breakfast, while striving to meet efficiency measures set out by a boss with 'targetitis'. Our cries for higher pay are fobbed off with 'uptitling' - for instance, where a receptionist becomes Head of Verbal Communications without any appreciable change of duties.

We then go home for rest and relaxation, a situation so unfamiliar to us that we suffer from 'leisure sickness' as we struggle to fill our unstructured free time.

Men may suffer from 'irritable male syndrome' brought on by plummeting testosterone levels associated with a male menopause, and both sexes may be plagued by 'kitchen performance anxiety' while trying to knock up a tagine of oak-smoked lamb or some such nonsense when our foodie friends pop round for supper.

Not all of us are lucky enough to make it on the jobs market, however; Collins has identified a new social group of educated individuals who cannot get meaningful work. They are 'sad grads' who are likely to end up going home to live with mum and dad after finishing college.

In between scouring the job ads down at Somerfield or the JobCentre, they flop around at home watching 'council telly' - that's one without a set-top box, satellite or cable reception, or even a DVD to liven up proceedings.

I mentioned this latest term to a friend who, rather unkindly I thought, observed he thought a council telly was a 42in plasma screen with directional satellite dish.

He also offered some terms he was disappointed to note had not made it into the Gem.

They are: 'pramface' - apparently used to describe less-than-gorgeous pop stars who look as though they would be more at home pushing a pram around a shopping precinct; and the 'Liverpool/Glasgow/Cockney facelift' (or choose another town to suit your prejudice). This term, I'm told, denotes a severely scraped-back pony-tail secured with one or more scrunchies. Devotees often sport 'bingo wings' - ill-advised displays of generous upper-arm flesh.

Such cruelty is quite exhausting to report. I'm off to grab a little 'me-time' - another of the new boys in the Collins dictionary, and one that, for a change, needs little explanation.

Updated: 11:50 Wednesday, March 03, 2004