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Oxford Dictionary Says "Twerk" Dates Back to 1820

posted by cmn32480 on Friday June 26 2015, @01:44AM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @10:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @10:33PM (#201839)

    I'm missing something. How is having the word "cisgender" to give a word to the (culturally accepted) common case of gender identity any different from having the word "straight" to give a word to (culturally accepted) common case of sexual orientation? Or, for that matter, different from having the word "human" to give a word to the common case of species for sentient beings?

    I guess I'm not surprised by people disagreeing with other people's views on gender identity, but I'm flabbergasted by someone taking offense in there being a descriptive word for a very common gender identity.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @10:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @10:45AM (#202034)

    It is because in my first exposure the use came from a place of hate. Same is true for almost all uses I've seen since then (meta discussions about the meaning being the rest). As a straight white male it was enlightening having hate speech aimed my way, so in a way I'm grateful. That aside it is hate speech, clear from the context, so they should stop.