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Can a simple slangy acronym mark a generation gap? YOLO, short for "You Only Live Once," has emerged as an age-based shibboleth: all too familiar to members of the millennial set, and all but meaningless to their elders. In my latest Boston Globe column, I dissect the YOLO phenomenon, but there's much more to say about those four letters.
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Another week, another update from a dictionary publisher reflecting recent additions to the lexicon. Last week, it was Merriam-Webster rolling out new words, including such eyebrow-raisers as f-bomb and sexting. Now comes Oxford Dictionaries Online with their quarterly update, making space for some trendy neologisms, including lolz, ridic, and the nefarious mwahahaha.
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We'd like to welcome writer, editor, and designer James Harbeck as our newest regular contributor! His specialty is "Word Tasting Notes." "Words are delicious and intoxicating," Harbeck writes. "So why not taste them like a fine wine?" Here, he savors the word chiaroscuro.
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Jennifer Miller writes: "When I was brainstorming titles for my debut novel, I had in mind something intriguing yet bold — a title that screamed Read Me Now! And after weeks of making lists and scouring the thesaurus, I found the five-word masterpiece that I was looking for: The Year of the Gadfly." But there was a problem.
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Let's say you've just arrived from another planet, with a mastery of English, but little exposure to the popular sport known as golf. So you don't understand why one golfer would hit a "banana ball" and end up with a "bogey," while another used a "chicken stick" and ended up with an "eagle."
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As my sons Doug and Adam have spent more time surfing the Internet, they've seen plenty of examples of people leaving insulting comments on Facebook pages or YouTube videos just to get a reaction out of other people, who don't realize they're being played. They've also picked up the vocabulary for this kind of behavior: trolling. I've been familiar with the concept of trolling for 20 years now, but it turns out to have undergone some changes during that time.
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If there's one thing that dictionary publishers have learned, it's that announcing new words added to their latest editions is good for generating some media attention — and also generating public hand-wringing over what the new entries say about the state of our society and our language.
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