The World Cup in South Africa, climate change, the credit crunch and technology have all left their mark on the way we talk, the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English reveals, as the latest crop of new words to be added to its pages is published on Thursday.
Football fans will perhaps be unsurprised to learn that the vuvuzela has blared its way into the dictionary’s pages. By being ushered into the dictionary, which is based on how language is really used, the metre-long plastic horn has cemented its immortality as well as its ubiquity.
Climate change, an issue only marginally less controversial than football refereeing, has also made its mark. Even the most ardent sceptics will no longer be able to deny the existence of “carbon capture and storage” — the process of trapping and storing carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels — or “geo-engineering”, better known as the manipulation of environmental processes to counteract the effects of global warming. The new words appear today in the third edition of the single volume dictionary, which was first published in 1998.
Two of the buzzwords of this economically squeezed epoch also figure: toxic debt, used to describe a debt that has a high default risk, and the rather less snappy quantitative easing: the introduction of new money into the national supply by a central bank.
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