Pixelated Semantics

On giving mucus troopers the hairy eyeball

It's that time of year when the lexicographers announce their new words. Wardrobe malfunction, bird flu, nearshoring, phishing, and strippergate are highlighted from the Canadian OED. HarperCollins promulagates bunnyfascist, drink-and-dial, and Mistletoe Molester, via their new "Living Dictionary", an on-line forum which "revolutionizes the way words are collected and enter the dictionary - throwing open the doors of language research and recording to embrace words from anybody and everybody". The BBC throws in adultescent and mucus trooper from HarperCollins, and adds from the Oxford Concise English Dictionary va-va-voom, speed dating, and flash mob. Meanwhile the electronic edition of the Oxford dictionary announced that it would add the words hoochie, fanfic, po' boy, beat down, hairy eyeball and crack ho. They claim an "afro-american" origin in HipHop culture for these, however several have an older pedigree than that, hoochie and po' boy in particular are very old slang, and hairy eyeball has certainly been heard here in Australia since the 1970's at least - indeed the Macquarie dictionary already has it under "Aussie Expressions". The popularity of certain words and phrases in highly visible circles seems to allow currency of use to obviate any sense of historical or geographical use attached to modern terms. The Oxford's worthwhile list is online at http://www.oed.com/help/updates/latest-additions.html, and contains numerous terms the press omits, such as cyber-war, and interestingly, Derridean, (after the philsopher and marking an extremely quick trip into the lexicon for a proper name). The very Aussie "trackie daks" and "howzat" also make it - about 25 years after becoming common here. It's hard to understand why such well-established terms are now "new", and it is difficult to consider "cead mile failte" to be a new English phrase (as it is Gaelic for "One Hundred Thousand Welcomes") - but ultimately someone has to make those decisions. Perhaps HarperCollins idea to debate new words online might be an elegant solution to the shortcomings of lexicographer's knowledge (and after all don't we all operate to the limits of our own knowledge of a subject?)

It's also worth observing that it is typical of American youth culture to appropriate widely from other sources, then repackage acquisitions with the hollywood glitz of "originality". The end result is often the originating culture accepting americanised usage as authentic; this has been shown to be very true of language particularly. Claiming afro-american origin for the phrase "hairy eyeball" for instance, when it demonstrably has had historical use elsewhere; this pattern of the migration of the origins of cultural artefacts is possibly endemic to the nature of the english language itself, ever expanding by claiming "foreign" words as its own. And older "obsolete" words are rarely re-discovered for common use.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 9:37 am ::