OT
wordsmith(smythe?) alert
Latest Word: 'Klingons' in, 'Muggles' Not Quite
nytimes.com
OXFORD, England, Nov. 11 - Heard the one about the fashionista and his arm
candy who live in parallel universes, prefer chat rooms and text messaging
to snailmail, suffer sticker shock at the cost of pashminas and like chick
lit or airport novels?
This trendy tale is nonsense, of course, but it is now Oxford-approved
nonsense.
All of these new expressions are among the 3,500 additions to the
just-published edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, updated to
record new words or new applications of them that have entered the language
since its last revision, in 1993.
Oxford has been around for a long time, so shorter is a relative concept -
the two-volume dictionary is 3,792 pages.
But it is beach reading compared with the full 20-volume Oxford English
Dictionary.
The lexicographers scrolling through their 70-million-word database inside
the Oxford University Press's columned campus headquarters have had a
breathless decade. "With technology and the speed of communication, new
words and usages become established much more quickly," said Angus
Stevenson, 42, the new edition's co-author.
The velocity of change has made the dictionary's customary method of
certifying new words or usages positively quaint. "By tradition a word has
to be used five times, in five different places, over five years, but
something like 'text messaging' got in sooner because it became so widely
used so quickly," said Claire Turner, a spokeswoman for the trade and
reference department.
The new words come from fast-talking areas like global marketing, science
fiction, popular literature, films, business and politics.
There was a time when Oxford lexicographers could go their clueless ways.
"When the word television came into general use," Mr. Stevenson remembered,
"one academic complained that no good would come of an invention that had a
half-Greek, half-Latin name." Many of the new additions shed light on the
decade's obsessions. There are "wannabe," "aerobicist," "body-piercing,"
"comb-over," "lipectomy," "body mass index," "orthorexia," "Botox,"
"Viagra" and "Prozac."
"Klingons," "Jedi knights" and the "Force" have fought their way into the
book along with other "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" references like
"dilithium," "warp drive, "dark side, "mind-meld" and "Luke Skywalker."
"Falun Gong" and the "Taliban" enter for the first time, along with
"asymmetrical warfare" for the standoff between great powers and
less-equipped ones.
New social concerns account for "economic migrant," "gateway drug" and
"asylum seeker." The last edition faithfully recorded "Thatcherism" and
"Thatcherite." The new one introduces "Blairism" and "Blairite." There is
the party that Blairism created - "New Labor" - and a word that detractors
use for Blairites: "spinmeisters."
Expressions coined for "Bridget Jones's Diary," by its author, Helen
Fielding, like "singletons" and "smug marrieds" make it, but under the
five-year rule, J. K. Rowling's "muggles" to delineate the nonwizards in
the world of Harry Potter is too recent to slip in. That word is still
listed as an American slang term from the early 20th century for marijuana
cigarette.
"Terms of abuse are a particularly productive area," Mr. Stevenson said,
but he quickly pointed out that their frequent use was hardly new.
"Shakespeare used them all the time," he noted.
A majority of references once came from Britain, but no longer. "America is
the biggest and most productive influence on the language now," Mr.
Stevenson explained. The book sells for $150 in the United States, roughly
equivalent to the £95 price in Britain.
The Shorter calls itself a historical dictionary, and it sets out to record
every word used in English since 1700, with the dates of when each was
first uttered or written and what it meant at the time. Definitions are
listed numerically, though the order does not imply preference, as in
standard dictionaries, but rather the chronological record of their
appearance in speech and literature.
The emphasis is not on correct usage, but on common usage, and language
purists and Queen's English snobs should look elsewhere. Mr. Stevenson and
his team take particular delight in words that over time come to mean the
reverse of what they originally did.
"One of my favorites is 'nonplussed,' " he said. "It has always meant
puzzled and confused, but we have evidence that in America some people use
it to mean the opposite, as in 'sort of shaken but not stirred,' like 'He
was doing his best to appear nonplussed.' " Mr. Stevenson flashed a
conspiratorial look. "It's really a mistaken use," he said.
Asked for a personal favorite from the new phrases, Mr. Stevenson cited "go
commando," which the dictionary says means to go out wearing no underwear.
"We got it from the TV series 'Friends,' " he said, "and then we tracked it
back to American college slang in the middle 1980's, and we reasoned that
that's when the 'Friends' writers were probably at college. It could have
been a private joke in a small group about commandos being too rough and
ready to wear underpants, and now it's turned into a phrase that is
recognized by a global audience."
He said the detective work made the job particularly interesting, though it
might not be for everyone. "Obviously the majority of language references
is not made up of fun phrases like 'go commando,' and we spend a lot of
time arguing with equal vehemence about things that would seem extremely
obscure to average people," he said.
He brightened at the recollection of one of them. "The verb 'to text' " he
said. "That's the kind of thing that lexicographers get very excited about.
'Oh, they're using "text" as a verb' - we love that sort of thing." |
