Dictionary Gives Rare Words One Last Chance

It's official: 'Jeggings' is a word

(NEWSER) - Language purists, avert your eyes: The Oxford English Dictionary has added some new words. Here they are, along with the Daily Mirror 's helpful definitions:

• Mankini: "The revealing male bathing costume made famous by Sacha Baron Cohen in his Borat film."
• Retweet: "Sharing a Twitter message."

No one wants to teach grammar because it's not fun: Kim Brooks

(NEWSER) - Sometimes, while Kim Brooks is grading essays by her college composition students, she cries. "Not real tears, exactly—more a spontaneous, guttural sob, often loud and unpleasant enough to startle my husband or children," she writes in Salon . Why? Because many of these students "simply ... cannot write." They don't have basic skills, like knowing how to organize paragraphs, how to write a thesis statement, how to outline, how to proofread or edit, or even "how to make sure their sentences contain a subject and a verb." Is this the fault of the traditional high-school English class, full of class discussion but little writing and almost no grammar education? More»

Runners-up include 'socialism,' 'bigot'

(NEWSER) - Austerity measures announced by governments across Europe this year sparked a surge in civil unrest, and a surge in people trying to find out exactly what the word means. Merriam-Webster says that, based on search trends, the noun—meaning "enforced or extreme economy"—is its word of 2010. AP reports that the word was searched for on the dictionary's free online tool more than a quarter of a million times. More»

'Whatever' is worst; 'like' also highly irritating

(NEWSER) - “Whatever” is, like, the most annoying word in the English language, a poll finds—for the second year in a row, notes Reuters. The Marist survey of more than 1,000 Americans found that almost 39% think “whatever” is the most annoying English word or phrase; runners up were “like,” with 28%, and “you know what I mean,” with 15%. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, “like” was considered the most infuriating. More»

Colbert's favorite word is hotter than ever

(NEWSER) - It was five years ago today, and Stephen Colbert needed a word that could personify the "blowhard" persona he was about to launch on the Colbert Report. He was looking for something "sublimely idiotic," something "silly" with which to mock American pundits, writes Ben Zimmer in his New York Times "On Language" column. In a moment of inspiration, he picked "truthiness." A star was born. More»