HELLO OTHER, LESSER ARL. THIS THREAD DOESN'T CONCERN YOUR PARTICULAR TRANSGRESSIONS, BUT SHOULD YOU CONTINUE WITH THESE ACIDIC BARBS, I WILL MAKE IT KNOWN THAT YOU ASSOCIATE WITH A KNOWN THESPIAN AND MATRICULATED IN COLLEGE! ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION, AT THAT.
― Cabaret Voltron (PUNXSUTAWNEY PENIS), Saturday, 2 April 2005 05:57 (twenty years ago)
Oh sorry brosmos, I'm getting all senseydefensey after being tut-tutted by ILX's community of shrieking hausfraus.
I dunno, I tend to harvest this stuff from my savvier, nerdier friends. (WTF is this 'child murder' stuff though?)
― Cabaret Voltron (PUNXSUTAWNEY PENIS), Saturday, 2 April 2005 06:09 (twenty years ago)
two years pass...
New Dictionary Includes 'Ginormous'
By ADAM GORLICK
Associated Press Writer
Published July 10, 2007, 5:00 PM CDT
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- It was a ginormous year for the wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster. Along with embracing the adjective that combines "gigantic" and "enormous," the dictionary publishers also got into Bollywood, sudoku and speed dating.
But their interest in India's motion-picture industry, number puzzles and trendy ways to meet people was all meant for a higher cause: updating the company's collegiate dictionary, which goes on sale this fall with about 100 newly added words.
"There will be linguistic conservatives who will turn their nose up at a word like `ginormous,'" said John Morse, Merriam-Webster's president. "But it's become a part of our language. It's used by professional writers in mainstream publications. It clearly has staying power."
One of those naysayers is Allan Metcalf, a professor of English at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society.
"A new word that stands out and is ostentatious is going to sink like a lead balloon," he said. "It might enjoy a fringe existence."
But Merriam-Webster traces ginormous back to 1948, when it appeared in a British dictionary of military slang. And in the past several years, its use has become, well, ginormous.
Visitors to the Springfield-based dictionary publisher's Web site picked "ginormous" as their favorite word that's not in the dictionary in 2005, and Merriam-Webster editors have spotted it in countless newspaper and magazine articles since 2000.
That's essentially the criteria for making it into the collegiate dictionary -- if a word shows up often enough in mainstream writing, the editors consider defining it.
But as editor Jim Lowe puts it: "Nobody has to use `ginormous' if they don't want to."
For the record, he doesn't.
Copyright © 2007, The Associated Press
― Stormy Davis, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 22:34 (eighteen years ago)