In this column last December, I wrote that Google had revealed that the most searched-for term in Australia in 2019 was "fires near me". I then suggested that the most searched-for term in Newcastle was a dead-heat between "Andrew Johns statues near me" and "breakfast happy hours near me". Wrong, as it turned out, but that's what we should have been searching for.

One of the joys of teaching or being professionally engaged as a sentient learning enhancement facilitation unit (or however the latest jargon describes teachers), is out-of-the-blue contact with former students.

Once in a while, a former student drops a line and says "g'day, I'm doing this now, I live here, I miss Newcastle, how are you"? Social media makes it much easier to see this unfurl on a screen while drifting in-and-out of consciousness on the all-stops late-night train from Sydney, but it's when former students take the time to reach out that makes me less miserable.

Just on the term "reach out", I don't really fancy it at all. It sounds a bit too much happy-clappy rehab facility speak, but it seems all the go in contemporary argot. No one "contacts" anyone anymore. People "reach out". I still feel nostalgically warm for Oz rock in the late '80s when I hear Noiseworks' Jon Stevens belting out the anthemic Reach Out. Remember that?

Remember the ridiculous music video of Noiseworks precariously perched on a rocky outcrop only accessible by chopper and being attacked by huge swells banging up the cliffs? "Reach out, reach out, reach out and touch somebody..." What a chorus. Oz rock! Upon a more sober reflection some three decades down the road, the suggestion by Mr Stevens to "reach out and touch somebody" is probably unwelcome and dangerous advice if taken literally. Might result in a prison term.

It's not unusual to develop an aversion for a word, a saying, or a term. In contemporary bureaucracies such as universities, management buzzwords and terminology revolve in-and-out of favour as if on a giant sushi train.

If something gets up your goat, you just have to wait, usually not that long, until the gear grinding utterance fades from everyday use. Once the suits drop it, the buzzwords are gonski.

You don't usually have to suffer "buy-in", "take it to the next level", "in-this-space" or "empowering user groups", for too long before someone influential catches a new way to say something at a meeting.

Influencer influenza spreads the new expression until it too eventually fades gently into the night.

A former University of Newcastle student who I had the pleasure of teaching many moons ago is now a senior manager for Google in Australia and New Zealand.

She dropped me a line to advise that the search engine gargantuan could indeed shoot me a list of the top trending Google searches in Newcastle in 2019. Such a list is a thermometer of the times, a snapshot of us at a particular time in history and even an indication of what we were most interested in at that time.

Perhaps in years to come, such lists will provide researchers with an insight not readily available elsewhere.

This is the top 10 trending Google searches in Newcastle in 2019.

Surprising? What questions arise from this list? Were we searching for Little Nas X's monster hit Old Town Road - with around three-quarters of a billion views for the "movie" and "official video" versions on YouTube - to cop a glimpse of the haircut on Billy Ray Cyrus? A beautiful thing it is too.

The playfulness and logical absurdity of the song and video was, and remains, pure, unadulterated fun: "My life is a movie, Bull ridin' and boobies, cowboy hat from Gucci, Wrangler on my booty." Nonsense. Irresistible nonsense.

Is the list particularly remarkable? Two World Cups. Two elections. A television series. Food, technology. Two high-profile men, both of whom died in 2019.

I'm looking forward to seeing the list of what we most searched for in 2020.

Stockton east coast low? Newcastle air quality index? Knights grand final starting team?

I'll reach out to readers with the list in early December.