Dr. Seuss adds a word to the dictionary

In October, Merriam-Webster announced that it had added 455 words. Many of them come from new terms associated with the pandemic and some from general popular culture. My favorite is this one:

"Oobleck : a mixture of corn starch and water that behaves like a liquid when at rest and like a solid when pressure is applied. Oobleck gets its name from the title of a story by Dr. Seuss, Bartholomew and the Oobleck, and is a favorite component in kids’ science experiments." 

This is almost like seeing the book Frindle come to life. No spoilers. If you haven't read it as a kid, you could still read it as an adult. 

This is not the first word coined by Dr. Seuss to make it into the English language. The word "nerd" first appeared in If I Ran the Zoo published in 1950.. He used it rather like Lewis Carroll used Jaberrwocky -- a made-up name for a made-up creature. 

And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-troo
And bring back an It-kutch, a Preep and a Proo,
A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!

In 1951, the word had already taken off with th emeaning that we assign it today. Merriam-Webster recounts:

  Newsweek carried an article about the latest slang that includes the word nerd. "In Detroit," it notes, "someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd, or in less severe cases, a scurve."

 Unfortunately, the book that book is among the 6 that are no longer published pictured here:

. 

Related: The literary origins of robots 

Dictionary updates

The Oxford English Dictionary wants to show itself to be keeping up with trends and trendy words, some of which  you may wish you never heard of. Its blog has post Buzzworthy words added to Oxford Dictionaries Online – squee! has been paraphrased by a number of other online news sources already. But odds are good that this is the only one not to include a picture of Miley Cyrus demonstrating a move in the not Disney approved dance known as twerk (one of the additions).

Those who are interested in the digital currency movement may be happy to see that bitcoin makes it in (in the lower case form).  And in a nod to something that's been practically beaten to death in tech circles, BYOD is there. It's intersting to see how many of these are underlined by Blogger's spell check, about half I'd say, including the title's own "squee" and "selfie," another word we may wish we didn't have to have.
Here's the full list of Oxford's updates.

apols

A/W

babymoon

balayage

bitcoin

blondie

buzzworthy

BYOD

cake pop

chandelier earring

click and collect

dappy

derp

digital detox

double denim

emoji

fauxhawk

FIL

flatform

FOMO

food baby

geek chic

girl crush

grats

guac

hackerspace

Internet of things

jorts

LDR

me time

MOOC

omnishambles

pear cider

phablet

pixie cut

selfie

space tourism

squee

srsly

street food

TL;DR

twerk

unlike 

Jane Austen's influence on English language

A recent Guardian article on Jane Austen as the "queen of modern slang:" fits quite well with a piece I wrote a few months back about the influence of her work on the literature that followed -- as confirmed by big data in The Big Wow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory

The Guardian article informs us that

Oxford professor Charlotte Brewer told the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye that while Austen had a great influence on the first Oxford English Dictionary published in 1928, she is quoted 1,640 times in the most recent edition.Entries include 321 phrases from her 1815 novel Emma, which includes ‘dinner-party’ and  ‘brace yourself’. She also came up with ‘if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you 100 times’.

As the piece is very short, though, it adds in a piece of what it considers good news: an upcoming  BBC adaption of Death Comes to Pemberly. I don't usually like the modern writers' takes on the most popular couple of Pride and Prejudice. Someone picked out that book for me once, and I couldn't even bring myself to finish it. That's saying quite a bit. However, I have no objection to the Jane Austen stamps issued by the UK recently. They are little works of art in themselves.