Four times a year, the Oxford English Dictionary adds some new words to its lexical repertoire.
In December, the wordsmiths at the OED added more than 500 item.
Though most of the new words are simply old words with the prefix ‘un’ slapped on the front, such as the adjective ‘unmacho’, there are a handful of new words that are a bit — well — newer.
These new words often relate to technology or colloquialisms that proliferate thanks, in large part, to technology.
An example of this is the addition of First World problem, a phrase popularized by the meme of a crying girl with superimposed text proclaiming a trivial ‘problem’ such as ‘I have more clothes than clothes hangers.’
Some of these new words are rooted in trends, but the brass at the OED has the unenviable task of deciphering which trends may be counter-intuitively long-haul versus which will simply fade away come the flipping over of the next calendar year.
For example, ‘upcycling’ has been around for ages, but was just added as a word to the OED last year.
‘Sciency’ was also added as an adjective to describe things that are somewhat scientific or technical, or people who have an aptitude for science, as in, “That’s one sciency biochemist.”
Inexplicably, ‘baked potato’ was just added in 2014, as was ‘beatboxer.’
Guardians of vocabulary enshrined in the pages of books have to consider the shelf life of new words as well as their currency. They must preserve the traditions and proper usage of language while evolving to reflect its adaptations to a constantly changing world.
Matters of language are much more fluid when it comes to online dictionaries.
There are a billion and one online dictionaries floating around out there in cyberspace, up to and including the cultivator of all things slang (whether or not it’s popular slang in your local area), urbandictionary.com.
With that site’s user-generated content, there isn’t a consensus on the definitions of very many words, whether they’re words or names or abbreviations or acronyms.
But unlike the more thoughtful cultivators of language over at the OED, urban dictionary user-contributors have the option to update quickly, efficiently, and spread their definitions far and wide.
That is both a strength and weakness, because although wacky words can spread like wildfire over the Internet, what appears on the Internet is not always what it seems.
There’s a reason the phrase is “one for the books” and not “one for the website.” While websites have the flexibility to change with the winds of creative or depraved (or sometimes both) minds, paper dictionaries are unapologetic in their finality.
And that requires them to be more well thought through, even if some of their additions seem silly in my books.
