Tony Talks Tech

If you’re a stickler for correct grammar and spelling, you might want to shield your eyes from this next article. No, there won’t be any errors in the article itself (hopefully), but it concerns a topic which will likely be controversial to English traditionalists. The Oxford University Press has announced some of the new additions to its New Oxford American Dictionary, and they’ll be familiar to anyone who has ever spent time on the internet. That’s rightlanguage from message boards, social media sites, and more is invading the venerable tome.Abbreviations are one of the largest groups of additions. These include “BFF” (Best friend forever), “TTYL” (talk to you later), and “LMAO” (laughing my a off). There will also be new verbs and nouns inspired by actions online, including “defriend,” “cloud computing,” “hashtag,” “tag cloud,” and more.The online arena isn’t the only source of new words. Others are coming from hardcore punk (“straightedgehaving an ascetic or abstinent lifestyle”), finance (“zombie banka financial institution that is insolvent but that continues to operate through government support”), and even female social commentary (“tramp stampa tattoo on a woman’s lower back”).The dictionary isn’t a stranger to new words, but this year does represent one of the largest updates in recent times, with over 2,000 new words and phrases added. The last update to the American Dictionary was in 2005. The first edition was published in 2001, three years after the publication of a similar one-volume dictionary, the New Oxford Dictionary of English in the United Kingdom. The NOAD uses a diacritical respelling scheme for pronunciations, along with the traditional Gimson phonemic scheme.The history of the Oxford University Press’s line of dictionaries, however, goes back even further. The first volume of A New English Dictionary was published in 1884, with proceeding volumes published periodically for the next two decades. Between 1928 and 1933, this was reissued as the 13 volume Oxford English Dictionary. A second edition was published in 1989, and the Press is currently working on a third.