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"Woot" Becomes an Official Word
tekgoblin writes with a quick bit about new words in the COED. From the article: "Concise Oxford English Dictionary is the smaller but most widely recognized derivative of the official Oxford English Dictionary, which is celebrating this August its 100th anniversary. To celebrate, the lexicon published its 12th edition today that adds more than 400 new entries – many of which reflect the technological vocabulary found in today's society, like 'woot,' 'mankini,' and 'jeggings.'"
Is it w00t or woot?
Now that COED have given it's approval, hopefully the Queen will have the good taste to call out the noobishness displayed by the looters and offer them a royal teabagging.
but now I no longer have any respect for the OED
The OED is a descriptivist dictionary, as opposed to a prescriptivist dictionary. That means that the OED includes words that are actually being used, rather than prescribing which words should and should not be used. This means including words that many people object to, but too bad, there are a large number of people who use the word regardless of any official position about the word.
If you want to speak a language which has a prescriptivist authority, then I recommend French or Spanish, they have institutes that declare what is and is not proper language, and if you disagree, then you're wrong. If you want a language that is generally descriptivist, then stick with the Germanic languages, where we recognize that the authority on language is a native speaker, and not some people locked up in a room declaring that "ain't isn't a word" even though 70% of the population uses it on a regular basis.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Woot.com is one of the sponsors of a conference I attend. A couple years back they began giving each attendee a box of random swag - with the company logo: WOOT! on the box.
When I brought it home after the conference and my wife saw it she couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.
She's one of the several hundred remaining speakers of Chinook Jargon - a west-coast American Indian trade language that has become an L1 on at least one multi-tribe reservation. It seems that WOOT-l'et (my phonetic approximation, not one of the canonical spellings) is a word in that language for penis.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The OED reflects words in common usage at the time of the publication of the edition not necessarily words that have passed the test of time. Words are not removed so that someone is the future can read a book published x years previously and still have a reference guide for those that are now out of use and the reader has not previously seen defined or been taught. It is a reflection of what is in use not a conservative list of what should be in use if everyone spoke the same static language. If that were the case we be missing a lot of words used quite correctly everyday in the tech press and would may not be able to understand them correctly in years to come once they drop out of use. As for staying profitable and relevant, the UK pays OED for free online access for EVERY library card holder in Britain so they can log in and use it from home or the library. That makes it very relevant as I cannot afford to pay for digital access nor buy a complete edition, and I would hope at least a little profitable.
Since the OED lexicographers are over an office divider from where I am sitting I guess I'm in a good position to answer this.
The most important point to make about modern dictionaries is that they are descriptive not prescriptive. That is to say that they describe the language as it evolves rather than tell you how you should use it. Lexicographers are like scientists though they do not generally consider themselves as such, everything they include in their dictionaries has made it there through painstaking linguistic research.
Please believe me when I tell you that my lexicographer colleagues have no interest in being 'hip'. Trust me on this one, I see them walk past my desk every day. Instead they are passionately interested in language and when a word has amassed enough evidence of usage in modern English they include it in their modern English dictionaries. Evidence of sufficiently common usage to be considered to have entered the language is their only value judgement.
It is also worth spelling out the differences between the different Oxford dictionaries. The OED is a massive multi-volume historical dictionary based on human research. You would use it to find the etymologies of words over a milennium. The Oxford Dictionary of English and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary however are corpus based dictionaries, they are derived from computational analysis of a billion-plus word corpus of contemporary English. That kind of stuff should be right up the average Slashdotter's street. Thus words like 'woot' and 'leet' (The lexicographers are funny about numbers in words, don't blame me) will not have been selected for trendiness but because the corpus analysis tells us people are using them.
The multi-volume book sells rather well as it happens. Not to many individuals but there are a lot of schools, universities and libraries in the world. And yes, we do have two dictionary websites. But as to a desperate attempt to stay profitable, the OED itself is not likely ever to do that. It took decades to produce its first edition, decades more for the second. We are a publishing company that is also a not-for-profit department of a major university so the OED is a project created for its academic value rather than its monetary return.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
It's nice to know that we're not "Any schmuck" :)
However my lexicographer colleagues would take issue with their decision to include a word granting it any sort of "official" status. They are scientists though they often don't see themselves as such, all their inclusion means is that they have found sufficient evidence of the word's use for them to consider it to be part of their record of contemporary English.
Whether a word is part of a user's "official" vocabulary is purely up to that user, not to anyone else and certainly not to us.
Oxford Dictionaries Online