Monash University: Taking a deep dive into the Australian lexicon. “Shortly after arriving in Melbourne, Howie Manns was lost looking for a cafe called ‘Arvo’. Now, together with colleague Kate Burridge, he is heading a new research project exploring Australian slang.”
South China Morning Post: Malaysian Instagram slang bank creates a graphic archive of the country’s unique urban language. “Loading” according to the Cambridge dictionary is defined as putting goods onto a vehicle, or in finance it means a charge added to an investment. But to Malaysians, since the arrival of the internet, ‘loading’ refers to someone slowly processing information. This is one of the 300 Malaysian slang terms posted so far on the on MySlangBank Instagram account, an archive of urban language made famous by social media and terms already woven into the country’s culture and identity.”
Phys .org: The use of jargon kills people’s interest in science, politics. “In a new study, people exposed to jargon when reading about subjects like self-driving cars and surgical robots later said they were less interested in science than others who read about the same topics, but without the use of specialized terms. They were also less likely to think they were good at science, felt less informed about science and felt less qualified to discuss science topics.”
CNET: Baby Yoda makes it onto Dictionary.com’s list of new slang. “If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months and want to find out who Baby Yoda is, you can now look him up in the dictionary. Dictionary.com on Wednesday unveiled a list of new slang additions, which include OK boomer, VSCO girl and cancel culture.”
GenealogyBank: Genealogy 101: Using the Dictionary of American Regional English for Genealogy. “In this article – part of an ongoing ‘Introduction to Genealogy’ series – Gena Philibert-Ortega describes a helpful resource for genealogists, the ‘Dictionary of American Regional English,’ and how it can help with your family history research. Gena is a genealogist and author of the book ‘From the Family Kitchen.’”
Lifehacker: Learn New Teen Slang Through This Gen Z Glossary. “Oh, hello, there. I am just brushing up on my Gen Z vocabulary, thanks to this glossary shared on Twitter by a high school teacher named James Callahan. Apparently, he had been keeping a running spreadsheet of the new slang terms he would learn from his students. This week, a kid from his class tweeted screenshots of it, and then that tweet went viral, and then Callahan gave the world a gift by making the whole document public.”
ScienceDaily: Analysis of billions of Twitter words reveals how American English develops . “Linguists and geographers analysed 8.9 billion words contained within 980 million Tweets posted across the United States between 2013 and 2014 to identify the regions from which new words tend to originate. Led by Professor Jack Grieve, from the Centre for Corpus Research at the University of Birmingham, researchers used advanced computer technology to analyse the geocoded Tweets which revealed the precise longitude and latitude of the user at the time of posting.”
Quartz: The Oxford English Dictionary is opening its gates to teenage slang—via Twitter. “As a historical dictionary, the OED is interested in the meaning of words and also the changes in usage over time. To help produce its comprehensive record, OED has launched an appeal to teenagers to tweet or write in about the latest words that they’ve been using.”
The Next Web, and I apologize for censoring the heck out of this headline: Dictionary.com now explains slang like basic b*tch, cuck, and f*ckboy to normies. “Buckle up for the news of the century fam: Dictionary.com is upping its street cred with a bunch of new, funky-fresh slang definitions… This means you no longer have to sit around like a chump when the cool kids start dropping modern terminology at parties, nam sayin’. Instead, you can whip out your phone and and consult Dictonary.com for some turnt words you can use to show you’re truly part of the gang.” My favorite recently-learned slang is caping. It just means to defend someone/something, often mindlessly.
Quartz: It’s official: “Shitpost” is the word that best describes the internet in 2017. “Each January, the American Dialect Society selects a single word or phrase that best represents the mood and interests of online discussions in the previous year. From a nominee list that included ‘blockchain,’ ‘rogue,’ and ‘digital blackface,’ the society has selected ‘shitpost’ as the “Digital Word of the Year” for 2017.”
Marist College: ‘Whatever’ Loses Ground but Retains Annoying Word Title. “For the ninth consecutive year, Americans say ‘whatever’ is the most annoying word or phrase used in casual conversation. But, fewer Americans feel that way than in previous years. Residents under the age of 45, compared with their older counterparts, do not find the word all that bothersome.”
YourTango: 21 Acronyms & Hashtags The Cool Kids Use On Instagram (And What They Actually Mean). “If you, like me, have ever stumbled across a hashtag or acronym on Instagram and had no clue what it meant, rest assured that you are absolutely not alone. ‘WCW? MCM? What are these? Drugs?’ These are words I almost surely said to myself as I began my own persona foray into the magical world of Insta. To save you from confusion, I’ve broken down 21 of the most commonly used hashtags and acronyms you’re likely to find in captions and comments on Instagram.” These are an odd mix of those I would have considered obvious/well-known (QOTD) and some I’d never heard of (MCM and WCW – and WCW does not in this context stand for World Championship Wrestling.)
UMass Amherst: Why Is This Linguist #Talmbout Twitter?. “The lickety-split spread of the phrase stay woke is just one linguistic development you can clearly track via Twitter, says Lisa Green ’93, professor of linguistics at UMass Amherst….Green recently collaborated with Brendan O’Connor, assistant professor at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, and computer science doctoral student Su Lin Wang Blodgett on a case study of dialect in Twitter conversations among African Americans. They collected a whopping 59 million tweets from 2.8 million users, including 830,000 tweets aligned with Twitter users in African American English-speaking neighborhoods.”
An enormous slang dictionary recently went online. “Holed up in his London flat, Jonathon Green has been toiling among his antique books for years, trying to bring a great work to the masses. That work includes 1,740 terms for sexual intercourse (boozle, bop, bonk, bake the biscuits), 4,589 related to getting drunk (atomized, above par, unable to hit the ground with one’s hat) and 521 that allude to murder (do in, eighty-six, O.J.). And now, after years of struggle, that work has finally gone live on the web.” Basic functions of the dictionary are free.
Merriam-Webster has added a slew of new words. Some of these are to be expected — dox, microlending, bitcoin — but is this really the first time cold case and cold turkey have been added to MW?
