And so are cyberbullying, domestic goddess and textspeak. Woot?
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| It’s official, Retweet is a word. Image credit :Twittermania. |
“The new 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary contains some 400 new entries, including cyberbullying, domestic goddess, gastric band, sexting, slow food, and textspeak,” editor, Angus Stevenson, announced on Oxford press blog yesterday.
Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook et al have created “a real language of the net,” prompting the wordsmiths to create some new entries to keep up with generation Y-ers.
Other web/textspeak including retweet, momo, noob, nurdle, and woot? and mankini (thanks Borat), now have their own official entries in the dictionary as does ‘follower’, which means’someone who is tracking a particular person, group, etc. on a social networking site.’
“Sadly, the new edition has no room for tremendous words like brabble ‘paltry noisy quarrel’ and growlery ‘place to growl in, private room, den’ – what we might call a man cave these days,” Stevenson laments.
The additions are just carrying on the tradition of the “dictionary that has always sought to be progressive and up to date.” he writes.
Around since 1911, among the slang words used in its first ever edition included: flapper, ‘girl not yet out [in society]’, foozle, ‘do clumsily, bungle, make a mess of’, mag, ‘halfpenny’, piffle, ‘talk or act feebly, trifle’, and potty, ‘trivial, small’.
Meanwhile, ‘marconigram’ which means ‘message sent by Marconi’s system of wireless telegraphy’, was 1911’s hi-tech equivalent of cloud computing.
