SoylentNews

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.

---

Original Submission

• Crazy (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @03:31AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @03:31AM (#201376)

  The guy who wrote most of that dictionary was crazy:

  The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED, begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W.C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

  http://www.amazon.com/The-Professor-Madman-Insanity-Dictionary/dp/0060836261 [amazon.com]

  Minor's condition deteriorated and in 1902, due to delusions that he was being abducted nightly from his rooms and conveyed to places as far away as Istanbul, and forced to commit sexual assaults on children, he cut off his own penis (autopeotomy), using a knife he had employed in his work on the dictionary.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor [wikipedia.org]

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+1
  Informative=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		1