Monday, July 22, 2013


The noun and verb Tweet,  (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on.--John Simpson  Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary
Other New OED entries in latest 2013 Edition include:
Big Data:  "data of a very large size, typically to the extent that its manipulation and management present significant logistical challenges".
Crowdsourcing: getting other people to do your work for you, origin credited to a 2006 article by Jim Howe in Wired 
E-reader:  both a device on which you read ebooks, and a human being who habitually reads such books. (Why the habitually?)
Mouseover: when you move your mouse-pointer over something on a computer screen, and something else (text or an image) pops up. (Seems a little late in the game for this one now that "touch" screens have all but eliminated mice) 
Stream (the verb)  [with object] Computing transmit (audio or video data) continuously, so that the parts arriving first can be viewed or listened to while the remainder is downloading.

There's also now a new definition for an old word:  "geekery". Now the OED allows it as "obsessive devotion to or knowledge of a particular (specified) subject or pursuit". But the word has existed since at least 1947 to mean "the bizarre or grotesque acts performed by a carnival or circus geek".
A Wing(suit) and a Prayer
to have a cow:  popularly associated with Bart from The Simpsons, but  OED entry traces the phrase back to 1959. 
handyman special: euphemistic term in reference to house/building in need of major renovations--with earliest evidence from 1938. 

wingsuit...as worn by this intrepid gravity resistant thrill-seeker. 

 But what intrigued me most is that the majority of the rest of the 2013 tweaks focus on words containing hand, head and heart — a mighty 2,875 in total including “headfuck” and “knobhead”.

The entry for "head" itself shows 126 different meanings of the word in all sorts of contexts: “an accumulation of foam or froth on the top of certain drinks, esp. beer”, “a headline in a newspaper”; “a headmaster or headmistress”; “a promontory, a headland, a cape”; “a tidal bore”; and so on.
Some variant spellings of head thru the centuries
Heads Up.
With "head" we remain in the big leagues as far as its phrases too: the total roll-call is 112: to go over a person’s head (1909 onwards, originally from the United States); to keep one’s head above water takes us right back to Shakespeare’s time (1608-); to bring (something) to a head crops up a hundred years before that, in 1566, in a description of how to treat a boil on a horse.  two heads are better than one (1546 onwards) and the list goes on and on...
Also notable in latest batch of additionsincludes "dad dancing" (dancing poorly, as fathers allegedly do), "payday loan" (now depressingly topical but first recorded in 1937),  transphobic ("hostile towards transsexual or transgender people") and Fiscal Cliff (for which I'll spare you the depressing details)  

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