The Oxford English Dictionary recently added two terms peculiar to the 21st-century lifestyle: couch surfing and ego-surfing. If you’re a relatively independent 20-something* you’ve probably done a bit of both.

Ocean waves have been washing against the shore for millions of years, and at some point in the last several hundred years the word we use to name that phenomenon, the noun surf, entered the English language, possibly from India via trading missions, travelers, or early British colonies. The use of surf as a verb is more recent, dating back to the first part of the 20th century, when the term surfing was applied to the traditional Polynesian sport of riding the waves while standing on a plank of wood. The Hawai’ian surfer Duke Kahanamoku helped to popularize it as a sport in Australia and the United States, and today people surf the waves in places like California, Costa Rica, and the Canary Islands.

The idea of surfing the web naturally had to wait until the creation of the Internet, but it’s an apt term to describe how we skim over sites and pages – and how we sometimes find ourselves drowning in a sea of information! When you’re ego-surfing, you’re typing in your own name into a search engine to see whether or not you’re part of that ocean of facts and photos.

Surfers who can’t afford to stay in hotel rooms might travel around the world from beach to beach by couch surfing to save money. When you’re couch surfing, you’re staying with friends (or friendly strangers) who are willing to share their living space with you, allowing you to sleep on their couch for a few nights before you move on to the next location. There’s even a website devoted to matching up people who need a place to stay with those who have a place available.

Aloha!

* ”20-something” (or twentysomething) means “in their twenties” – that is, someone between 20 and 29 years old, a typical age for both ego- and couch-surfing. “30-something” is also commonly used, but other age decades are generally not referred to generically in this way. However, if you’re speaking about a specific person whose exact age you don’t know, you can say, “That dude must be 70-something and he’s still ripping the biggest waves.”