Frazzled Englishwoman, goblin mode, butter boards, cabbage circles – can you spot the odd one out? | Arwa Mahdawi

As a miserable year limps towards its end, let's talk about the silly trends that have cut through the gloom. Sorry if you came here for geopolitics

Want to play a fun end-of-2022 game? That was a rhetorical question, I'm afraid. You have no choice. They're compulsory at this time of year. In this game you have to answer the question: Is this the name of a trend widely discussed by the media in 2022, or is it a deranged combination of words that I just made up?" Four of the following are the former and one is the latter. Here we go: 1) frazzled Englishwoman, 2) goblin mode, 3) butter boards, 4) cabbage circles, 5) quiet quitting.

Before I reveal the answer, I want to point out that this was a surprisingly difficult quiz to devise. I'd think of something ridiculous, then Google it and find out that it was an actual trend. (And by trend" I mean a phrase that a TikToker coined and content-hungry media people, such as myself, wrote frantic thinkpieces about.) But the answer, before you all die of suspense, is number four. Yep, even the frazzled Englishwoman trend was real. Apparently an Australian TikToker went viral with an observation that her fellow Australians were suddenly dressing like middle-class Englishwomen in Richard Curtis films from the noughties: sensible, charity-shop-chic vibes, eclectic scarf collections, damp air of worry. Anyone who has ever met a middle-class Englishwoman will immediately recognise this aesthetic and wonder why it never had a name before.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist