Hugh Binnie wrote:They had an article about this in the Times on Saturday. It said about 1200 words were going in and "a rather smaller number" were coming out (including INTERNAUT — get the pencil while you still can!), so it doesn't sound like there should be too much to do.
As The Times online content now has a 'paywall' (now in the dictionary!), I've copied and pasted the article below. I thoroughly recommend subscribing to The Times BTW- great content including 'read the papers as printed' where you can get the whole week's papers for the price of The Sunday Times, and play some of the puzzles online. But then I used to read The Times anyway, and couldn't find a newsagent to deliver.
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Ins and out of the Oxford Dictionary of English by Tom Whipple
Last updated August 7 2010 12:01AM
When does a newly minted word become accepted? When it’s chosen for one of the Oxford English dictionaries, of course
BROMANCE a close but non-sexual relationship between two men.
Origin: early 21st century; blend of brother and romance.
CHILLAX calm down and relax: you can dance to your favourite tune, chillax or have friends over.
Origin: early 21st century; blend of chill (sense 3 of the verb) and relax.
FREEMIUM a business model, especially on the internet, whereby basic services are provided free while more advanced features must be paid for.
Origin: early 21st century; blend of free and premium.
Angus Stevenson, of the Oxford Dictionary of English, says: “These ‘blends’, as we call them, are so widespread that we could put almost any number in, but we have to use our judgment. A lot seem to be invented by marketing people and journalists. Bromance seems valid, particularly as a reference to a certain sort of film (they used to be called buddy movies). There’s a history of terms like that in writing about film; romcom, for instance, which is now totally established. Chillax is different. I suspect the time when people really used it is gone. It may well eventually die out, but that doesn’t mean it will merit removal. In 30 years’ time a novelist writing about the early 21st century might need to use it to evoke a certain period charm.”
QUANTITATIVE EASING the introduction of new money into the money supply by a central bank.
DELEVERAGING the process or practice of reducing the level of one’s debt by rapidly selling one’s assets.
SPOT-BUY pay for (a currency or commodity) immediately after a sale is made.
Stevenson says: “I don’t believe quantitative easing was a common term before the financial crisis, even in economics. If the economy was still bumping along nicely, then it would stay an obscure academic term. But the current situation has led us to focus more on economic terms — many of which, before the credit crunch, were unfamiliar. In-depth reporting of the crisis has brought a lot of terms to the fore that would have otherwise escaped public notice.”
PAYWALL (on a website) an arrangement whereby access is restricted to users who have paid to subscribe to the site.
VUVUZELA a long horn blown by fans at soccer matches in South Africa.
Origin: perhaps from Zulu.
Stevenson says: “I’m glad we thought ahead and put these in. Vuvuzela had been on our list for a few years, but never quite spread from South Africa. But its moment came with the World Cup — it’s rare that you get a word with such a perfect arc. We also noticed paywall as being common a year back, and it seemed like a word for something that needed a name.”
WATERBOARDING an interrogation technique simulating the experience of drowning, in which a person is strapped head downwards on a sloping board with the mouth and nose covered, while large quantities of water are poured over the face.
EXIT STRATEGY a pre-planned means of extricating oneself from a situation that is likely to become difficult or unpleasant.
SURGE a major deployment of military forces to reinforce those already in a particular area.
ROGUE STATE a nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
Stevenson says: “Every conflict has its own vocabulary. With the Falklands it was ‘yomping’; with Iraq it is ‘troop surge’. When a war is reported we inevitably come across new terms, even if they have actually been around for a while. ‘Exit strategy’ dates back to 1973, and it looks like it was originally a business term used by a few specialists. But it only came to our attention when it was appropriated by the military. ‘Rogue state’ took a while to get in, partly because it was less in need of defining. It’s a two-word compound and, even if you hadn’t met it before, you would still have a vague idea what it meant. ”
. . . AND OUT WITH THE OLD
CASSETTE DECK a unit in hi-fi equipment for playing or recording audio cassettes.
FLASHCUBE a set of four flashbulbs arranged in a cube and operated in turn.
INTERNAUT a user of the internet, especially a habitual or skilled one: “the newest generation of Internauts are the business or commercial users.”
Origin: 1990s; blend of internet and astronaut.
CYBERSLACKER a person who uses their employer’s internet and e-mail facilities for personal activities during working hours.
Stevenson says: “You take words out at your peril. Words rarely disappear — and it’s the less-common words that people often want to look up. The problem is, though, we’re bounded by the space of the book. So some have to go. In the early 1990s a lot of internet slang was flying around. It was mainly used by journalists and, although worth recording at the time, never really made it. The idea that the internet was so exciting that you needed a special name for people who used it, particularly with the ‘cyber’ prefix, now seems as old-fashioned as flashcubes.”
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just found a longer article:
How Oxford anoints the new words
Tom Whipple
August 5 2010 4:57PM
Blow your vuvuzela, cybreslacker. It’s time to chillax with the latest bromance while Internauts find an exit strategy
Angus Stevenson crinkles his nose. “We’ve got our eye on ‘glamping’,” he says before adding, in parentheses: “Terrible, terrible word.” He unwrinkles his nose, closes the conversational brackets and continues. “It started as a marketing thing, but now seems to be being used in a more natural way.” Back to parentheses. “We don’t like it at all.”
Glamping might sound like an activity that happens after pub closing time in the rougher areas of Glasgow, but it is actually a portmanteau of “glamorous” and “camping”. And Stevenson may sound as though he doesn’t approve of such innovative constructions, but that does not mean that — in his work for the Oxford Dictionary of English — he won’t approve them.
After all, this year he has already given “bromance” a reluctant nod, and last year he backed “staycation”. Glamping might yet make it next year. “That seems to be the way people form words these days,” he says. “They don’t take them from Greek or Latin, they find two and join them together.” He should know. Stevenson is the head of projects at the Oxford Dictionary of English — and it is he who decides when a new word is ... well, a word.
Fifteen minutes’ walk from Oxford station, past Worcester College, and along a side street, four towering Corinthian columns guard the entrance to the Oxford University Press. Through the porter’s lodge and across a Georgian quad that makes the building seem more like a college than a publishing house, there is a large open-plan office. In the office, sitting behind an anonymous desk, Stevenson and a team of half a dozen lexicographers work as gatekeepers to the English language.
The latest edition of the dictionary, published later this month, will have 1,200 new words — and will have lost a rather smaller number. Some of the new entries read like a social and political history of the year — “toxic debt” and “quantitative easing” now justify their own definitions, as do “exit strategy” and “rogue state”. “Waterboarding”, for so long the Cinderella technique of the torturer’s toolkit, also has its day in the sun with the entry: “Interrogation technique simulating the experience of drowning.” But how do they become official? What has “chillax” (calm down and relax) achieved in the past year, that glamping — still awaiting its turn — has not?
It used to be that approving a word was a semi-rigorous process, a bit like beatifying a saint. The Oxford University Press, which has been making dictionaries since the 1870s, employs “readers” in Britain and North America who look at English-language publications — newspapers, magazines, novels, film scripts — and try to spot words that aren’t already in the dictionary. They also solicit submissions from the public — a tradition that goes back to Victorian times, when James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, issued an “appeal to the English-speaking and English-reading public to read books”.
Traditionally, if a word was flagged up a set number of times in a fixed number of years, from a range of reputable sources, it found its way into the dictionary. The dictionary still employs human readers — and an electronic one, a web crawler that trawls selected sites to augment a database of two billion uses of words. Yet the final decision is more of an art than a science.
“The old methods really aren’t sustainable,” Stevenson says. “There’s a feeling that, with the internet, people are freer with new words. People meet them more frequently, and people put down in print things that up until now they would have been less happy to do.” It would be silly, he adds, to leave it a few years for words such as staycation to qualify. “You already have people’s aunties saying ‘I’m going on a staycation this summer’. How could we wait?”
Instead, he tries to judge whether a word is a fad or here to stay. “When it ceases to be just on a trendy website, that’s quite interesting. If the press start to use a word in a way that shows they assume their readership knows it, that is also important,” he says. “Women’s magazines are very good. The Times is also productive, particularly in the weekend edition, where it seems quick to pick up New York slang.”
Given the time taken to publish, and also that few buy a dictionary every year, his job is also to anticipate. A good example is “paywall”, which had been used on technical blogs for a while but has gone truly mainstream only since the most recent dictionary went to proofing stage in December 2009 — and, indeed, since The Times introduced one, charging for online access. “It struck me as a word for something that needed a name, so I was keen on it. I thought it had to catch on. I took a punt.”
There is one judgment call of which Stevenson is even prouder: “Vuvuzela”.
“We had been tracking it for quite a few years,” he says. “It was popular in South Africa, but hadn’t made it into the wider world. In the run-up to the World Cup it started getting more mentions, and I thought, ‘This is going to explode’.” The problem, though, is surely that the vuvuzela’s popularity has hit its peak? Is it not as modish as any fad, to be forgotten in 20 years?
“The vuvuzela has become a moment in time,” Stevenson says. “In four years, some music journalist will refer to the ‘vuvuzela-like sound of the backing band’. It will be used in analogies for ever, even if only by swots such as Martin Amis and Will Self, and people will need to look it up.” Stevenson confesses, as an aside, that he rather likes Self’s ostentatious use of vocabulary. “You think he just sits there looking words up and chuckling at himself, thinking, ‘They’ll never know this one’. It makes me smile.”
He is less benevolent towards language pedants who try to be clever in other ways. “Sometimes people cling to shibboleths, those famous issues that they use to show how intelligent they are, how well they know English. Our job is to reflect the way that people use language rather than insisting that this is the way it is.” In this he echoes the words of Samuel Johnson, who said in the preface to the first dictionary: “It must be remembered, that while our language is yet living ... these words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water.”
Five minutes’ walk from the OUP, back along the street, there is an Italian restaurant. There, over lunch, Stevenson is explaining his view on the correct, and changing, use of “enormity”. The waitress, meanwhile, is trying to get us to choose our main course. Stevenson returns to his menu, where one dish is described as “Seared salmon, rocket and gremolata”, and he becomes distracted. “Gremolata,” he says. He repeats the name of the condiment. “Now that’s an up-and-coming word.”
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Charlie Reams wrote:Ian Volante wrote:Is there an easy way to find out what's new in the dictionary to aid such spindlexing?
It depends how much they changed the definitions. Assuming not much, you can compare page-to-page pretty quickly and see what's new. I don't envision this being a major project, but we'll see how it goes.
Fairy nuff. If you want my help, drop me an email, as I might not check on this thread for long.
"My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me." Benjamin Disraeli
Or leave it as it is and let the pedants complain in bug reports 
