We’ve all either been victims of it or guilty of it, ignoring the person right in front of you in favor of your smartphone. The term used to describe the rude behavior is “phubbing” a combination of phone + snubbing.
How this word came to be though is just as ridiculous as the behavior. Unlike many slang words it wasn’t created in some middle-school classroom or spawned from a hip-hop album. Nope, “phubbing” came to be on the campus of the University of Sydney.
The people behind the Macquarie Dictionary of Australia hired ad agency McCann Melbourne to gather a bunch of wordy literary minds to invent the new word, probably spending thousands of dollars to do so. Because what reason do people have to buy a new dictionary if there’s no new words?
Via Fastcompany