The Oxford Dictionary Online has published its latest new words and the inevitable public outrage has followed. Cries of, ‘What’s our language coming to?’ and ‘We’re going to hell in a handcart!’ abound from the usual quarters. What many don’t realise, however, and something I didn’t know until recently, is that the Oxford Dictionary Online is not the same as the Oxford English Dictionary. The latter is the one most like our notions of a traditional dictionary, although it does go much further than other editions in keeping obsolete words in there as well as modern coinages. The Online Dictionary has a very different role: tracking current trends in language and recording them. Inevitably, but not exclusively, many of these new words will be colloquial. Slang. Not considered ‘proper’ English.
As The Good Grammar Company and a self-confessed word nerd, I was invited into my local radio station to talk about the new words, and then by BBC Radio 5 Live. I suspect they were hoping to hear me say how appalled I am that such colloquial terms should make their way into our illustrious language, but although there’s a part of me that balks at modern slang, I can see the value in recording it. Never in the history of language have we had such an opportunity to record aspects of speech as well as written language, and if social media has done one thing for us it’s provided a crossover between the two modes of language use.
Today, everyone can be a writer, no matter how ‘poor’ their language skills, and what would at one time have been uttered to friends and lost forever is now in the public domain, providing hard evidence about the evolution of our language and its users.
One point I wanted to make on the Radio 5 interview was that many of the ‘on trend’ words have not made the list. Some should have been flagged, with ‘photo bomb’ being just one example. After all, ‘selfie’ was the word of 2013.
But there are other words and phrases not available, and this would be one area where the current compilation methods fall short. Words are tracked using the World Wide Web, so when a new term is coined it appears and can be identified, but what about those words that have recently acquired more than one meaning? When the word tracker picks up words that already exist, such as ‘destroy’ or ‘spit roast’, anyone who is unaware of the more salacious connotations of these terms won’t realise that they are, if not new words exactly, new meanings for words.
The ‘spit roast’ term in particular gets my attention. First, as a secondary school teacher in a past life, I once used the term – in its culinary sense – in front of a class of 14 year olds. I was so puzzled and upset by the resulting hilarity in the room that one of my colleagues had to draw me a diagram in the staff room. (Thanks Dave!)
Furthermore, that last term is used in greetings cards (and yes, I did send one to the staff of my former school!) so is obviously widespread enough to have entered the vernacular of the over 16s. So why isn’t it recorded on ODO? I can only assume that the dictionaries’ compilers are as naive as I was before becoming a teacher.
I’m not going to do the job of Urban Dictionary by explaining these terms here (and many more I’ve heard as a teacher. Perhaps that should be the subject of another blog?) but, if the speed at which I was cut off is anything to go by, I think the producers of Radio 5 Live may have thought I was going to go into more detail. The sudden, ‘Kathy, thank you very much indeed’ as soon as I uttered the word ‘destroy’ seemed to indicate that someone sitting opposite the presenter was miming the cut throat action and mouthing, ‘Get her off. Now!’
Oh well. It was exciting while it lasted.