Defining New Words

It seems that every time you go to open the dictionary there are a slew of new words that you may never have heard of before. Now most would say that that is the express purpose of looking something up in a dictionary anyways and it's true. You look up most words in the dictionary in order to ascertain the meaning and find out how it should be used. Well, the wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster's are readying their next copy of their dictionary and it is set to include some terms which have staying power but others that appear to be more like 'flavors of the moment'. I leave it to you to decide.

One of the words being included in this edition is the term 'ginormous' which is an amalgamation of the words 'gigantic' and 'enormous'. In recent years with President Bush's apparent penchant for producing neologistic disasters, one may think that the inclusion of 'ginormous' would be a sign of currying favor with the Bush Administration. But in this case, the term finds its origins in the British Army around 1948. It was originally a slang term which was later accepted into the mainstream. Now there in itself I have issue with the inclusion of the term. Slang may be current and in the moment and a reflection of the time, but is it necessary to consider it mainstream enough to include in the dictionary? I mean think about it. About eighty years ago, if you called someone 'gay' it meant that they were happy but today, despite gay people still being happy, it doesn't mean exactly the same thing.

Words are very powerful. They can hurt of they can help. I remember a few years ago a DC politician came under fire for using the word 'niggardly' which was misinterpreted to mean the N-word and suddenly everyone was up in arms calling for his resignation for his apparent racist remark. However, when some sane person decided to go look up the word in the dictionary, they suddenly realized that the term and context in which the word was used was correct and in fact, the word had absolutely no connection to the racial epiteth. That being said, it was a clear case of snap judgement in the face of ignorance. Had the council member not attempted to speak so eloquently, he would have undoubtedly saved himself a lot of headache and heartache.

This year terms such as 'IED' (or Improvised Explosive Device), 'DVR' (or Digital Video Recorder), and Bollywood (India's Hindi Film Industry) are among those terms being added to keep the current version current. But I wonder if old terms are being removed. I mean I remember when I said Walkman, there was a time when everyone would have known what I was talking about. Now it's like speaking Greek in an Italian town in the middle of Russia. You'll be lucky to find anyone under the age of 27 who will know what you're talking about. Sure we can include terms like iPod but these are terms that have no staying power and they need to be defined now, but not thirty or forty years from now. I have used the dictionary to understand a word I may have found or a term I am not familiar with but to say that I'll need to look up what an IED is means that I dont' follow the news at all and I can consider myself fairly ignorant.

I'd like to think that I'm not that bad when it comes to my perspicacity but there are times when I call it into question. There are times when I feel that perhaps I'm not making my point in the most effective manner but there are other times when I feel that perhaps I am speaking at too high a level for people to understand what I am talking about. Now I am sure there are some out there who are looking up some of the words I have used in this blog to find out what exactly I am talking about and that, to me anyways, is the best use of the dictionary; not to define moments of pop culture that will soon be a long lost memory of the past.