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text 2014-10-17 14:07
October #Bookadayuk - Day 17
Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English - H.W. Fowler,F.G. Fowler,John Bradbury Sykes

THE NEAREST BOOK TO YOU RIGHT NOW

I’m currently at work, and as a former secretary old habits die hard and the nearest book to me will always be a dictionary. The copy I have on my desk is a very battered 1978 edition of The Pocket Oxford Dictionary. It lost the slip cover years ago and it’s got kitty teeth marks on one corner, thanks to my bonkers Burmese who had a thing about chewing books.

It has been with me through school, college, about twelve job changes, and six house moves including relocation to another country. (Luckily for me, it has UK and US variations of the spelling of certain words). And it is always the second* item I reach for whenever I’m unpacking my box for my latest desk move.

* The first being my coffee mug of course.

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url 2014-03-14 19:46
New words added to the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford Dictionary of English - Angus Stevenson

Cross-posted on Soapboxing

 

The OED has published a huuuuge list of new words and usages, and it is good. Cue a raft of op-eds decrying the death of the English language, but those people can suck it. The list seems to sort itself out into the usual categories:

 

Overlooked and now obsolete words that are now getting recorded. Maybe obsolete is too harsh, but I imagine the heyday for the word beatboxer (n) was back when Biz Markie was a thing. (Men in Black 3 doesn't count.) The scimitar-horned oryx (n) is straight up extinct. 

 

Sciency (n) techno-words that describe something that is meaningful only to people with very specific letters after their names. Observe: dichloromethane (n), ethoxylated (adj), quadrupla (n and adj). Bonus points on that last for starting with a Q. Too bad it's too long to be a good Scrabble dictionary word, which is having its own round of OMGs after Scrabble opened submissions to the hoi polloi

 

Academicese. There's a whole lists of words that start with the prefix ethno-, as well as variations on the term hegemony. My favorite of the last group is hegemonicon (n). (We're going to fill the Hegemonicon with mud, mud, mud! Kids under twelve get in for free!) 

 

Why wasn't this in the OED before? Scissor-kick (n), demonizing (v), empath (n). In regards to empath, it's possible I watch too much science fiction. 

 

Foreign loan words: vato (n), shvitz (n and v), ese (n). Warms my heart to see some Yiddish. Some of these dovetail into the next, somewhat bullshit category of words which is...

 

Slang. This is where all the op-eds bemoaning the end of civilization come from. Slang seems to be an  iffy catch-all, referring to words like profanity, or words spoken by discounted groups of people - racial minorities, the poors - or just words coming out of youth culture. People seem to lose their shit about the last two, but slide more on the first. Given how old most swears are, there's really no way to argue that they're going to ruin Christmas if they haven't already.

 

There are four- four! - variations on the word cunt, in addition to three new sub entries on the c-bomb. There is also the utterly charming cunnilingue (n), which I assume means what I think it means. Also bestie (n). There don't seem to be the kinds of words that really get people into a tizzy such as netspeak, textspeak, or acronym words (like lol or wtf), so maybe this time the op-eds will be more muted.

 

I once got in a hugely stupid fight on facebook about the acronym word when a friend of mine blubbered about wtf making it into the OED. But that's an acronym, not a real word! Okay, sure, except for thousands of military words - they love their acronyms when things get fubar and they go awol - a lot of tech words - scuba and laser - and all kinds of organizations like Nabisco or the Gestapo (which is a funny juxtaposition.) The dictionary is not Miss Manners, nor is it a style guide. Use it wisely. 

 

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url 2014-01-22 01:24
O.E.D.’s New Chief Editor Speaks of Its Future

Word lovers will have to wait a little longer.  Being the digital age changes are afoot, but one thing at least remains the same--it still takes quite a while to complete a new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. From TOM RACHMAN's  article in the New York Times:

 

"To compile a dictionary of nearly every word in the English language was an endeavor typical of Victorian times, complete with white-bearded gentlemen, utter confidence and an endearingly plodding pace. After a quarter-century, the first installment emerged in 1884. Its contents? “A to Ant.”

 

In our own impatient age, the Oxford English Dictionary is touch-typing toward a third edition, with 619,000 words defined so far, online updates every three months and a perma-gush of digital data to sort through. 

 

. . . 

 

The O.E.D. has stood apart, partly for authoritative definitions but chiefly for its unmatched historical quotations, which trace usage through time. The first edition, proposed in 1858 with completion expected in 10 years, was only finished 70 years later, in 1928. The second edition came out in 1989, at a length of 21,730 pages. Work on the third started in 1994, with hope of completion in 2005. That was off slightly — by about 32 years, according to the current guess of 2037."

 

Link

 

 

Source: jaylia3.booklikes.com/post/768125/o-e-d-s-new-chief-editor-speaks-of-its-future
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url 2013-12-22 13:27
OED birthday word generator

So this is completely amazeballs: an interface that allows you to look up the words that were coined in the year of your birth. Mine was Internet. Whe! 

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review 2013-05-20 00:00
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage - H.W. Fowler,Ernest Gowers Probably my favorite book about the use of English. Fowler/Gowers explain English usage in ways that would make my high school teachers squirm, and validate many of my own biases!
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