UKC

How I hate that word which has been invented by the press and travel industry derived on the American expression "vacation". For the last 70 years or so I have enjoyed going on "holidays", I've never used the expression "vacation", and rarely heard it used in Britain unless spoken by visitors from the USA. 

I've noticed that due to the Covid travel restrictions the travel industry have invented "staycation" for UK based holidays, and now "seacation" for cruise holidays, and in yesterday's Sunday Times a company is offering "savecations" in a luxury spa hotel!

What next ? I wonder, will climbers be going on "climbcations", "walkcations", even "boulderingcations"? The mind boggles.

Stolliday just doesn’t have the same ring to it...

To me a Steakation sounds like a nice idea but might have to go on a diet afterwards!

Staycation - Engleeshe Corruptica

Whereas Stollenday might be good ...

Steakation followed by a Stollenday

I love Noliday though, a friend visiting with his children used it because their  trip was not a holiday😂😂😂

Toby

They started advertising holidays away from home as "awaycations" 

It has a Latin root and mostly came into English around the 13th century, from French. 

Feel free to favour holiday with all its religious connotations. 

Taking the day off to get your covid jag: vaccication

Holiday with the in-laws: altercation

Pub-crawl trip: libation

You can stick ‘staycation’ in the same orifice that must be home to such horrible terms as ‘hacks’ rather than ‘top tips’ and ‘side hustle’ for monetised hobby. Shudder.

"Staycation" is consistent with the concept of a "stay cup" that Starbucks offer one in America, the alternative being the "to-go cup".

Just to be sure, is this today's "Old Man Yells at Cloud" thread? 

If you do it outdoors, it's a "wild awaycation".

To really add to this... when did staycation morph from doing holiday type activities from your house to not travelling abroad? If you have come on a journey to clog up the rods round my house* with your f*cking caravan, you have not “stayed” anywhere. 
 

*other tourist destinations available, although it doesn’t feel like it at the minute 

To my mind, staycation would be 'holidaying from home' which is is what we did last July, with various day trips in our local area. If you are lucky enough to be able to get accommodation away from home you are on holiday, doesn't matter if the destination is in your home country or abroad the important part is having a break away from your normal home.

When companies started using it to promote holidays in the UK to people who would usually go abroad.  Bugs me too, in an 'old man shouts at cloud' stylee.  You're absolutely right of course - travelling somewhere within the UK to go on holiday is just going on holiday, a 'staycation' is using holiday time to take day trips from home.

Just to be clear, I think these are actually quite practical labels. As is staycation, which has the great merit of brevity - so I think it will stick.

I think you mean religious origins rather than connections? As an atheist I would find it absurd to stop using commonly used words just because they had religious origins!

I thought a staycation was stay at home. We had those the summer each year we moved home.

Staying in the UK is not a staycation, it's a low carbon responsible holiday.

I think the old man and the cloud is more of an altercation, albeit a bit one sided.

That doesn't change the fact that "vacation" isn't American. 

No way? That's absurd. Not many things are, but that is.

I like to imagine 'a person with a book of rules' keeping things like that from happening.

It is American English, although recognised and understood in Britain, it is not as widely used as "holiday". Have you heard the expressions "vacation industry", "school vacations", "mortgage vacation" being widely used over here?

Spending time with softly spoken people? A mumuration?

the usage to mean holiday certainly is an American usage.  I never heard it in the UK as a child but learnt it from imported US TV programmes and cartoons sometime in the 1960s.

Vacation as in vacation of premises, certainly British.  Also perhaps it was used earlier by University administrators, but perhaps that is not quite the same usage as it refers correctly to the period of vacation of accommodation by students rather than their summer holidays or any other holidays.

Would mastication be chewing or knocking one out?

I think that's a sailing holiday.

I am not debating this any longer. 

It's several decades since I was at uni, but we always referred to the Long Vacation. I think the word was in use in English to mean a holiday from university well before America even had any universities.

The biggest issue I have with the term staycation is the way it seems to be linked with settling for second best.

It's as though choosing to stay in the UK is a lesser holiday than going abroad. A lot of people and the media seem to think a holiday isn't a holiday unless you spend the days sitting by the pool / on the beach in 40c and the nights getting pissed. 

Can I give you two likes?

A piece of beef cooked with ginger, chilli and spices  would be a steakasian. 

To me a "staycation" was where you actually do stay at home but go out during the day and do the touristy stuff around where you live, and possibly eat out more than usual.  A domestic holiday is, er, a holiday, and indeed in my life so far has been the default, with a "foreign holiday" being one that involves planes, the Tunnel or boats.

Is it? So I don't need to feel guilty about going on my monster truck flame thrower deforestation peat-digging trip to Scotland by private jet then? 😁

Mastication is a fetish when people cover themselves in sealant. Ive seen it on a free TV channel next to Babenation. 

Whereas st. aycation is the Patron Saint of events. 

‘Staycation!’ Shouted the anode to the ion as it drifted towards the cathode. 

 

Although cooked with paprika, cayenne, bell peppers and okra and you’d have a yummy scrummy steakcajun. 

The only good thing about this stupid word is it allows for some world class punning

(detest the word and was going to post similar to you).

A trip to north Wales? Aberation 

yummy

Not if you bring me back a bottle. :-P

So, is a working holiday a vocation?

Maybe that's for grape picking or somesuch. A working hol completely spent under cover of a roof and surrounded by four walls would, I suppose, be an invocation.

A bottle of ion bru? (See my other post which the only UKC physicist got...so far...).

I'm surprised you're lowering yourself to using such a mongrel tongue as English at all; UK, American, or otherwise.  Have you considered solely communicating in Classical Arabic, or maybe Ancient Greek or Latin? Maybe French? Then you can rest easy that the Academie Francais are nobly resisting loanwords from invading your delicate ears!?

Language evolves... I find some of its evolution distasteful or sad (the loss of the distinction between disinterested and uninterested, the erosion of the meaning of decimate etc.), but it's unstoppable and today's neologism might be tomorrow's readily understood term.   The world evolves; new concepts or technologies require new words; try to describe modern IT in solely Victorian terms.  The choice is either to go with the flow or to insist on speaking in Old Saxon.

Still, being annoyed at staycation etc. is not as annoying as when climbers get annoyed at US climbers' terms like "send" etc, when the same UK climbers' use terms that are equally invented nonsense (crimp, guppy, sloper, gaston smear, smedge, campussing... not exactly English as Samuel Johnson would have recognised it?!).

Some amateur googling on my part shows there are more holidays taken here in the UK than abroad. So I can’t work out why we have a new word for something that is most common. Other than it is a put down:’we only had a staycation like the plebs  always do’. Or, it’s our desire to adopt new words just for the he’ll of it.  

I get the impression that "staycation" is not used to refer to holidays taken in the UK, more the concept of not having a "proper" holiday, rather staying at home and having an extended series of day-trips and exploring the local area.  Whatever the precise meaning, it's not worth getting het up about.  If it is a useful term, that describes a concept more efficiently than existing language, then it might survive; if it is an insufficiently useful term, it will die.  The people will decide.

Proper climbers don't go on holidays or ---cations of any sort; they go on trips. The word "holiday" suggests a frivolity inappropriate for the serious business of a climbing trip.

Its a disgrace isnt it? What happened to the proper approach when needing a new word of looking at other languages and nicking some nice sounding word which means vaguely the same thing.

Climbing holiday in Cwm Cowarch - Vegetation 

Let's not let British exceptionalism get out of hand here.

Whilst holidaying in the UK can be good, it is, using many metrics, objectively worse than abroad.

If you want, cheap travel, cheap hotels, guaranteed sunshine and cheap beer, then I don't know where to suggest in the UK.

Similarly, if you want 35 m sport climbing with no rain.

Similarly, if you want 1,000 m granite walls.

I've recently been having great day trips to forgotten gritstone quarries in the South Peak. These days, whilst fun, are objectively shitter, than the month in Patagonia I'd hoped for a year ago.

But holistay could work fine.

Like others have said, the main objection is that it often refers to going on holiday somewhere else in the UK, and not really staying at home.

But getting angry about words other people use (you can still use holiday if you want) is a serious waste of energy.

That is precisely what those of us who are having a whinge about it's current use, to mean a holiday within the UK, would say is the correct definition.

It's being used by marketing types to sell domestic holidays to those who would usually travel abroad.  So we plebs who usually stay in the UK anyway are irrelevant as far as they're concerned.

My recollection is that the term emerged during the 2008-2009 financial crisis when a significant minority of people lost their jobs or otherwise became financially constrained such that they couldn't afford to take holidays even elsewhere in the UK.

I think the reason it's morphed into "a holiday in your home country" is that the coronavirus-related foreign travel restrictions have affected vastly more people - as in, just about everyone who isn't happy to bend the rules to breaking point - most of whom have a vague memory of the term from a decade or so ago, and have appropriated it* for their current circumstances.

* inappropriately

Not sure if I know you, but the physicist my reply was intended for know the kind of bottle I meant.

As a chemist, I appreciated your stay cation joke.

Exactly this. I don't have a big problem with staycation but the application of it to trips within the UK is very annoying. The idea that you have to fly somewhere to have a 'proper' holiday is offensive.

Yes, this!  I'm a bit ambivalent about the word 'staycation' but at least it did actually have a proper meaning when used to describe taking time off work but staying at home.  I am disproportionately angered by it morphing into a word for a holiday that doesn't involve going overseas. 

ETA ... although, yes, as somebody has just also said, the implicit idea that a holiday in the UK isn't 'proper' does seem pretty offensive to the many people who can't afford to go abroad.  And that does add to the irritation.

Also those who can afford to go abroad but for various reasons choose not to.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=is+vacation+american+english&source=h...

I had a google, as far as common usage goes, it seems to be American English, I suppose it might be 'technically American' too, but it's hard to be technical about language, compared to science or engineering, something technical. I had a drunk conversation (he was rather drunk, and I was only slightly slightly slower than normal) with somebody about the definition of a dialect, and there's apparently a threshold or a percentage, above which words need to not be standard English for it to be a dialect. It seemed slightly arbitrary, compared to something more technical, along the lines of 'Who decided that percentage, and why?'.

I don't feel strongly either way, though, having googled, it'd be an interesting surprise to find that it isn't... 

A bit on Defaecations here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-56977157

when I started to go camping in the hills we always took an old ww2 entrenching tool to bury human waste

in fact I remember school summer camp to the Otterburn area where the first job was to build latrines.  The teacher in charge was one Michael Tolkien,  grandson of the One.