dragonfly editorial

Mouse potato? In the dictionary?

Posted by: Samantha Enslen, president and senior editor, July 18th, 2006

Merriam-Webster has recently unveiled a set of new words that will be included in the 2006 update of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. Among them are technocreations such as mouse potato and ringtone; terms that originated in advertising, such as supersize; and already-dated slang terms such as drama queen.

Do I really need this junk in my dictionary? Isn’t it easy enough to absorb the meaning of these terms just by watching Cingular commercials and old episodes of Will & Grace?

Personally, I only use the dictionary to look up words like chaulmoogra, muntin, or weltanschauung. I can figure out unibrow for myself.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 10:31 am and is filed under Resources for editors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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