Snowmance

What it means:You know how it is when you're on the piste. Your guard is down, your inhibitions melt away at the après-ski party, and that guy/girl is sooo masterful when he/she takes your hand and helps you negotiate your first death-defying descent on the beginners' slopes. Soon, you're slaloming headlong in love, and you spend your ski holiday falling over each other in the snow by day, and curled up together at the ski lodge by night. You're having a snowmance, but beware: when the snows have melted and it's back to real life, you might find the passion has dissipated like a puff of dry ice.

Where it comes from:We've had the showmance, in which two celebs embark on a fake relationship to publicise their projects, and the bromance, which is, of course, a perfectly healthy display of blokey bonding. The snowmance can be seen in ski resorts everywhere - it's great for warming up after a cold day on the slopes, but it's also doomed to crash in a flurry of powdered snow, as the frost-tinted fantasy hits the tree of reality, and everybody has to get back to their humdrum lives and get their feet back on solid ground. Best to make sure your snowmance is with someone from a different country, so you don't end up bumping into them on a rainy Dublin street in March.

How to say it:"Sean and Sorcha's snowmance was like the Irish weather - unseasonably warm in winter, but cooling off by summer."