Sunday, November 05, 2006

OED in the NYT

Excellent article on everyone's fave ginormous reference work. (Think ginormous in in there somewhere?)

Here's a little preview:

"Cyber-Neologoliferation"

Air kiss is defined with careful anatomical instructions plus a note: “sometimes with the connotation that such a gesture implies insincerity or affectation.”

Builder’s bum is reportedly Brit. and colloq., “with allusion to the perceived propensity of builders to expose inadvertently this part of the body.”

No one is particularly proud of the new entry as of December 2003 for nucular, a word not associated with high standards of diction. “Bizarrely, I was amazed to find that the spelling n-u-c-u-l-a-r has decades of history,” Gilliver says. “And that is not to be confused with the quite different word, nucular, meaning ‘of or relating to a nucule.’ ” There is even a new entry for miniscule; it has citations going back more than 100 years. Yet the very notion of correct and incorrect spelling seems under attack. In Shakespeare’s day, there was no such thing: no right and wrong in spelling, no dictionaries to consult. The word debt could be spelled det, dete, dett, dette or dept, and no one would complain.

2 comments:

Caroline said...

I am such a word-nerd; this article is fantastic. (As is the OED, of course.) I can't believe/love that they just added "wonky"--I use that word all the time!

Caroline said...

Oh, by the way, ginormous IS in the OED--as slang, of course! Defined as "Very large, simply enormous; excessive in size, amount, etc. (esp. in comparison with one's expectation)." You can't NOT love the OED now!