Dictionaries are savvy players in the Web publicity game. Here’s the model: alert the world to recently added words, and then stand back and watch as we write headlines like the one above. Last week, the Oxford English Dictionary announced its latest update, which along with the initialisms “LOL” and “OMG,” included the admittedly eye-catching ♥ (v. to heart), as in, “I ♥ NY.” (Or, to take a less popular example, “I ♥ Buffalo.”) ♥ is the dictionary’s first graphic symbol, and as the publisher notes, “may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper-stickers.”
When dictionaries wrangle contemporary phrases and modern slang, they can count on two reactions: misguided indignation and mirth. (Not coincidentally, the Internet, were it to have human emotions, could be summed up as one part misguided indignation, two parts mirth.) The best example of this wayward anger came from Alexandra Petri’s ComPost blog at the Washington Post. She writes:
If the OED weren’t a dictionary, I would be worried that it was a pedophile, given that it spends all its time hanging around people hundreds of years younger trying to seem cool.
…I find this physically painful. Whoever says words can’t hurt you has never seen me after the OED has announced another horrible mutilation of language that it’s just added so it can seem “hip.”
Petri is right: the O.E.D. is not a pedophile. Instead, it is far-reaching collection of English words, with an eye to history, which aims to be both prescriptive (these words and only these words are correct) and descriptive (these are the words that are used, as here’s how). When historians, linguists, and the generally curious want to know how people spoke in the twenty-first century, it will be useful to know about OMG and LOL, and how the phrases reflected usage that ranged from serious, to semi-serious, to full-on ironic. We may wince if our grandmother were to say, “OMG! You never write anymore.” But it’d be unfortunate if our grandchildren couldn’t figure out when the expression came into the language. (1917 it turns out, so not so new after all.)
As for mirth—that came from all corners, especially directed at the inclusion of “muffin top,” as both a noun referring to the better, non-stump half of the breakfast cake, and as a slang phrase describing “a roll of flesh which hangs visibly over a person’s (esp. a woman’s) tight-fitting waistband.” (The second usage may be especially useful for future historians, since Spanx may soon make the condition obsolete. Alexandra Jacobs has more on that.)
See? It’s funny when a musty, stodgy, and aloof thing like the dictionary defines goofy words in our midst. But this kind of cleverness would only work if the publishers of the O.E.D. weren’t so plainly self-aware. They know that from among this update’s nearly two thousand revisions and new words, it is muffin top that the Web wants, and so they give it to us and define it in the press release thusly, beating everyone to the joke:
The second sense is figurative, referring to a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers (cf. spare tyre n., love handle n.), which may sometimes be attributed to an excessive appreciation for muffin tops in the literal sense.
The O.E.D. is not “hip,” but its publishers are.
Photograph: karl frankowski, Flickr CC.