Welcoming some new words and banishing some old ones
How is the Oxford English Dictionary unlike the Trump administration?
Occasionally, in my “May I Have a Word” column in The Boston Globe, I’ve invited readers to coin English equivalents for foreign words that don’t yet have them. For instance, last October I asked for equivalents for five words, including tsundoku, from Japanese and meaning acquiring books and letting them pile up without reading them. Three readers came up with bibliopile, which earned them the grand prize — namely, bragging rights.
Now the Oxford English Dictionary has done an end run around this leisure pursuit and added 42 words directly from other languages. I thought this was rather high-handed of its editors until I read an explanation on the OED’s website:
Much has been written about so-called ‘untranslatable words’—words and phrases in one language that cannot be translated into another….
For people who speak English alongside other languages, there is an easy way to fill such a lexical gap—simply borrowing the untranslatable word from another language. Sometimes, they do this with enough frequency that the borrowed word eventually becomes part of the vocabulary of their variety of English. A few examples of such loan words are featured in this quarter’s OED update, which includes new additions from Southeast Asia, South Africa, and Ireland.
Indeed, dictionaries of Singaporean and South African — and Indian and Nigerian — and other Englishes include words and phrases that an American dictionary wouldn’t bother with, because we don’t use them here. The OED means to be comprehensive — to cover all the world’s varieties of English — so this step makes complete sense.
A list of the newly adopted members of the English family is included in the OED link above, and a New York Times article published yesterday discusses some of the more amusing ones, such as gigil (pronounced ‘ghee-gill’), a Tagalog word for the feeling of being overwhelmed by cuteness (kittens, anyone?), and to act the maggot, an Irish phrase referring to someone who’s behaving foolishly and risking embarrassment.
Speaking of acting the maggot, how about the Trump administration and the words it finds objectionable? The writers’ organization PEN America has compiled “a list of more than 250 words and phrases reportedly no longer considered acceptable by the Trump administration.”
PEN America reports:
The White House has said it did not create a banned words list but has instead left it to federal agencies to interpret how to comply with executive orders that solely recognize male and female sex or eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Nonetheless, some departments have added terms that seem to have nothing at all to do with those executive orders.
For instance, autism (doesn’t RFK Jr. say this a lot?), community, continuum (too complicated, no doubt), elderly, measles, political, and woman and women,
Shades of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four! About which, more soon. Did you know that the full text of that prescient novel is available on various websites, including this one?