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Oxford Dictionary Says "Twerk" Dates Back to 1820

posted by cmn32480 on Friday June 26 2015, @01:44AM   
from the what-is-this-world-coming-to dept.

takyon writes:

The BBC reports that the Oxford English Dictionary has added 500 new words for June 2015, including "twerk," a word that has seen use as far back as 1820, when Charles Clairmont wrote that "Germans do allow themselves such twists & twirks of the pen, that it would puzzle any one." The "twerk" spelling was used in 1901.

Other "new" words and phrases include choss, cisgender, depanneur, e-cig, ecotown, fap fap fap, FLOTUS, fo' shizzle, freegan, gimmick ("to mean 'a night out with friends'"), guerrilla ("describing activities carried out in an irregular and spontaneous way"), intersectionality, inukshuk, keener, mangia-cake, meh, SCOTUS, shipping ("the activity of discussing, portraying, or advocating a romantic pairing of two characters who appear in a work of (serial) fiction, esp. when such a pairing is not depicted in the original work"), Special Olympics, stagette, tenderpreneur, twitterati, uncanny valley, voluntourism, webisode, and yarn bombing.

The full list for June 2015 can be found here. Previous OED updates are here. Revisions are made every March, June, September, and December.

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Original Submission

• We used to use it in the fire department We used to use it in the fire department (Score: 4, Interesting) by NCommander on Friday June 26 2015, @02:02AM

  by NCommander (2) <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday June 26 2015, @02:02AM (#201345) Homepage Journal

  Twerking was a term we used when a firefighter is in full gear, its a sudden movement to prevent a PASS (Personal Alert Safety System) device from going out. The idea is when or SCBA gear was active, the high pressure air line activated the PASS. If you don't move when you're in gear, after 10-15 seconds, it would chirp, then send out a mayday signal to alert others you were non-responsive or otherwise in trouble.

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  Still always moving

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• Re:We used to use it in the fire department (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @08:24AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @08:24AM (#201434)

  So you worked in pairs?

  Parent