GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum

Quote:

ONCE A DECADE, Merriam-Webster updates its best-selling dictionary. The 11th edition, available in bookstores Tuesday, includes 10,000 new words and more than 100,000 new meanings and revisions among its 225,000 definitions.
Pop culture remains a vibrant source of new words, with such additions as ?headbanger? (defined as both a hard rock musician and a fan), ?dead presidents? (paper currency), ?McJob? (low paying and dead-end work), ?Frankenfood? (genetically engineered food) and ?longneck? (beer served in a bottle with a long neck).
Some of the new words have been a longtime getting the widespread assimilation that merits a move from the unabridged dictionary to the Collegiate. The citation file on the Yiddish exclamation ?oy,? for example, dates back to the immigrant waves of the 1890s. Others have zoomed into the language with the speed of the Internet.
The Web has spun the biggest influence on the American language in the past decade both with the new words it has spawned and the speed with which they have been adopted by the general public, said John Morse, president and publisher of Merriam-Webster.
?Typically, it takes 10 to 20 years before a word moves out of usage by small groups into the larger populace,? Morse said. But dot-commer ? someone who works for an online outfit ? made the cut in a scant five years.

BABY BOOMER SLANG
That?s not the only trend, he said.
?In new words for diseases and cures, we are clearly seeing the effect of aging on the baby boomers,? he said.
?Comb-over? (an attempt to cover a bald spot), ?macular degeneration? (an eye problem that primarily affects the elderly), and the adjective ?heart-healthy? (good for the heart), are all new to the 11th edition. Along with them have come a host of new words dealing with how we pay for medical services, such as ?primary care.?
?It is a reflection of society?s changes,? Morse said.
Over the past decade, Americans have also taken increasingly to adopting slang expressions ? such as ?bludge? (goof off) ? from other English speaking nations as far flung as New Zealand and Australia, he said.

Full story