The effects of the fast media of the last decade have penetrated even a conservative stronghold like the Oxford English Dictionary. The threshold time for introducing new words, five years of use, is no longer maintained as before. The abbreviated dictionary included expressions such as "snail-mail", which means regular mail, "Jedi knights" from "Star Wars"
Warren Hogg
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary. "The United States has the most significant and fruitful influence on language today"
Did you hear the part about the fashionista and his arm candy, who both live in parallel universes, prefer chat rooms and SMS text messages to snailmail and readers? chick lit Well, this rant has been officially recognized by the Oxford Dictionary. fashionista is a slightly sarcastic term for someone who is addicted to fashion, arm candy is a term from the gossip books, referring to a beautiful companion that famous people take to make a public impression, snailmail is the regular mail , which earned this nickname because of its slowness, and chick lit is literature aimed mainly at women, because of its romantic happy ending.
All of these new expressions are part of the 3,500 additions to the just-released latest edition of the Oxford Concise English Dictionary, which has been updated to include new words or update new uses of words that have entered the English language since 1993, when the dictionary was last updated. The Oxford Dictionary has been around for a long time, so "abbreviated" is a relative term - the two-volume dictionary contains 3,792 pages. But this is light reading material compared to the complete Oxford dictionary, which spans 20 volumes.
For lexicographers, working on a database of 70 million verbal entries in the building crowned with columns of "Oxford University Press", the last decade has been truly dizzying. "With all the technology and fast communication, new words and new usages enter the language and become established in it much faster than before," said 42-year-old Angus Stevenson, one of the authors of the new edition.
The speed of change has made the method used by dictionary authors to approve new words or new uses quite outdated. "Traditionally a word has to be used five times in five different places over five years, but a phrase like text messaging (sending a text message) entered more quickly because its use spread so quickly," said Claire Turner, spokeswoman for the dictionary's reference department.
The new words come from "fast-talking" fields such as global marketing, science fiction, popular literature, cinema, business and politics. There was a time when Oxford lexicographers could afford to move forward without having a clue where to go. "When the word 'television' came into widespread use," Stevenson recalled, "one academic complained that no good would come of an invention that had a half-Greek, half-Latin name."
Many of the new additions testify to the obsessions of the decade - for example "wannabe (acceptable disruption to want to be), "body-piercing," "lipectomy (liposuction), "body mass index," " orthorexia (obsession with healthy food), "Botox (misspelling of the word "under"), "Viagra" and "Prozac".
"Klingons", "Jedi Knights" and "the Force" appear in the dictionary, along with other references from the movies "Star Wars" and "Star Trek", such as "dilithium", "warp drive", "dark side" (The Dark Side) and "Luke Skywalker".
"Falun Gong" and "Taliban" appear for the first time, alongside "asymmetric warfare" - which means a conflict between superpowers and less advanced countries.
New social issues led to the creation of words such as "economic migrant" and "asylum seeker". In the last edition, the words "Thatcherism" and "Thatcherist" were faithfully recorded. The new one also offers "Blairism" and "Blairist". There is the party founded by Blairism - New Labor - and a derogatory term used to call the Blairists: "spinmeisters".
Phrases coined in "Bridget Jones's Diary" by author Helen Fielding, such as "singletons" and "smug marrieds" appear in the dictionary, but according to the five-year rule, Author JK Rowling's muggles - the definition for non-wizards in Harry Potter's world - are too new to cross the threshold. The word is still listed as American slang from the early 20th century and means marijuana cigarettes.
"Derogatory terms are a particularly creative field," Stevenson said, but was quick to point out that their frequent use is not new, "Shakespeare used them all the time."
In the past, most of the words in the dictionary were of British origin, but not anymore. "The United States has the most significant and fruitful influence on the language today," Stevenson explained. The dictionary is sold for $150 in the US and £95 in the UK.
The abridged dictionary perceives itself as a historical dictionary and aims to document every word in use by English speakers since 1700 with the dates when each word was used or written for the first time and its original meaning. The definitions appear in numerical order, although the order does not indicate the preferred usage, as in regular dictionaries. Here is a chronological record of the appearance of the word in speech and literature.
The dictionary emphasizes the common usage, and not necessarily the correct usage, and language purists and snobs of "The Queen's English" will have to look for what they want in another dictionary. Stevenson and his team are particularly fond of words that over time have acquired the opposite meaning of what they originally had. "One of my favorite examples is," he said. "Its meaning has always been confused and at a loss, but we have evidence that in America it is sometimes used in the opposite sense, something like 'a little shocked but not stunned', as in the sentence nonplussed' 'He was doing his best to appear' nonplussed that is, indifferent)". A sly look flashed in Stevenson's eyes. "Actually it's a misuse," he said.
When asked what his favorite new phrase was, Stevenson mentioned "go," commando, which according to the dictionary means to leave the house without underwear. "The phrase came from the TV series 'Friends,'" said Stevenson, "and we discovered that it was a slang expression in American colleges in the mid-80s. We concluded that this was the time when the writers of 'Friends' were probably in college. It may have been a private joke of a small group, about commando soldiers being too tough to wear underwear, and now it has become a phrase recognized by an international audience."
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