Thursday, June 21, 2007

OED legitimizes Islamofascism


Now that I have your attention...

No, the Oxford English Dictionary hasn't come out in favor of Islamic extremism; this is just an example of the new entries found in their latest update from June 14th. In addition to creating 140 new entries from primal scream (a form of psychotherapy used to release repressed feelings) to proteomics (a branch of molecular biology that studies the structure and function of proteins), they also added dozens of other entries from across the alphabet. Here are some interesting ones:

A. N. Other, a formulaic name dating back to 1884 used in place of a person's name.
"Would you deduce that he was Eustace, or the murderer, or A. N. Other?" -- Gladys Mitchell, The Croaking Raven (1966)

bangarang, a word used in and around Jamaica to mean either "rubbish" or "commotion; disturbance".

"I man cause ah fuss an' ah bangarang when I insisted dat Rastafari start from de civilisation of Egypt." -- Alex Wheatle, East of Acre Lane (2001)

chill pill, a slang term deriving from another slang term (chill v., to relax, take it easy), although they haven't yet figured out if it was originally used for any specific pill or drug.

prime time, not the TV time slot, but a phrase from the Christian Church, out of use for about 400 years, meaning, "the hour or time (in the early morning) of the daily office of prime." The oldest example given by the OED comes from a collection of Arthurian legends by Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471), possibly dating to before 1400:

"They pype vpe at pryme tyme, approches theme nere." -- Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur (1440)

Other familiar words in the latest update include flip-flopper, club-hopper, crufty, glitchy, scratch and sniff, and of course, flushable. And in case you didn't know, Internet is now a word.

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