It’s the end of the year and we’re sweeping out our closet — and that includes annoying words and phrases that we’re just so over. After the jump, we give you the ten most headache-inducing words of 2010. Let’s not bring them into the new year, shall we? And tell us what words you never want to hear again in the comments! Keep reading »
Thanks in part to the ubiquitousness of computers, kids no longer know how to write in cursive — and soon they will also probably stop using actual books. The Oxford English Dictionary announced this week that it will no longer be publishing a print edition and will only be available online. Keep reading »
As the hours of 2009 slip away, end-of-year lists are clogging up the internet, and everyone’s become nostalgic about the end of another decade. The year has seen some crazy trends, especially the obsession with leggings in all forms. Though we’ve poked fun at mashing two words together to create a new term for crazy clothes, it seems the good people at the Oxford English Dictionary aren’t joking around. Where once the term jeggings was a quick and easy slang term for skin tight jeans, it’s now totally official. With the new year, comes a new dictionary, and along with “Tweetup,” “unfriend,” and “zombie banking,” going forward, “jeggings” will be considered an official dictionary word. What out-there words will 2010 bring? [Guardian] Keep reading »
In this week’s Savage Love column, a guy (for convenience, I’m assuming it was a dude, but it could have been a woman) wrote in saying he’d coined the clever term “procrasturbation” and wanted help getting it into dictionaries. Procrasturbation, he explained, means “to waste time by pleasuring yourself.” He said he wrote Merriam-Webster back in 2004 about having the word included in their dictionary, but was told:
“Your coinage is clever, but I’m afraid that cleverness is not the criterion on which a word is entered into our dictionaries … For ‘procrasturbate’ to be entered, it will need to appear in a number of well-read print sources for a good number of years. When we’ve collected enough citations for the word, we will enter it into our dictionary.”
I happen to like the word, so in an effort to help get it into Merriam-Webster, I’m printing it here. So, what have you, readers? Are you procrasturbators? Do you regularly “waste time by pleasuring yourself”? Keep reading »
The kind editors over at Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary have updated the tome, adding in about 100 new words. Some of the words that made the cut: frenemy, webisode, waterboarding, locavore, vlog, flash mob, shwarma, green-collar, staycation, and reggaeton. To get added to the dictionary, editors have to see evidence that lots of people are using the word. Given this list, I’m kinda surprised that vajayjay didn’t make the cut. Maybe next year? [AP] Keep reading »
The dictionary has decided to be more inclusive than the US government. The definitive Merriam-Webster tome has redefined marriage as:
“(1): the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law (2): the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage [same-sex marriage].”
Now that’s a change we can believe in! So, Ellen and Portia, even through Prop 8 passed, your love still has its way with words! [365Gay]
Keep reading »
Michael K, our favorite gossip blogger/gay-at-large, has his own lexicon. On his site, Dlisted, he coins turns of phrase even more legendary and outrageous than the crazy cast of characters he covers on his beat. Basically, the K is the Merriam-Webster of celeb smack talk! So in honor of his juicy jargon, we’ve assembled some fan art we call the DicKtionary — an alphabetical reference for reading the trash talkin’ hilarity that is Michael K.
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