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A new batch of words has been added to Oxford Dictionaries Online, and the additions lean heavily on the lingo of online communication. "The world of computers and social networking continues to be a major influence on the English language," the Oxford announcement says, and sure enough the list has everything from Twittersphere to overshare to ZOMG. (The last one is a playfully misspelled version of OMG, as if someone is a bit too excited to type it correctly.) A sample follows below.
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Supreme Court justices are increasingly turning to dictionaries for semantic support when writing decisions, according to Adam Liptak of The New York Times. But Oxford English Dictionary editor at large Jesse Sheidlower says, "I think that it’s probably wrong, in almost all situations, to use a dictionary in the courtroom." Read the article here.
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Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer is in Montreal for the Dictionary of Society of North America biennial conference. He checked in with the CBC Radio show "Q" to give a preview of his talk on how lexicographers trace hip-hop slang from its earliest roots. You can hear the interview here, starting at about one hour into the June 8th podcast.
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The latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary has attracted a flurry of media interest, though much of the coverage has been misleading or downright inaccurate. We take a look at some of the more reasoned reactions to the inclusion of such new items as OMG, LOL, and heart (as a transitive verb, not as a symbol).
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Tomorrow is National Grammar Day, and in observance of the occasion, I'd like to recommend three resources that will prove valuable to anyone interested in grammar -- and if you are reading this column, I'd say that would be you. To give you an idea how I use them, I'll tell how they each entered into my research on a point of grammar I recently looked into.
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