this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Mildly Interesting

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

Which dictionary? Merriam Webster added almost 700 "words" this year, including shit like: TTYL, finsta, bussin, cromulent, doggo, simp, goated, and more. I feel like they are slowly becoming urbandictionary.com.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I mean, their job is to provide definitions for the words people use in language, not to gatekeep what words are "good enough" to be defined.

I hear each of the words you've listed all the time, they're part of our language whether we like it or not.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

My point was more about which dictionary do you use and less about the exact words added. Webster added them, but Oxford and American Heritage didn't.

[–] Maalus 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Use all of em and if it appears in any it's a word

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Now I want to play a game of scrabble where you play a complete nonsense word, and your points are the number of Google results for that word - lowest points wins. And maybe you have 5 letters instead of 7.

[–] Sanctus 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I would rather be able to spell out bussin' for points than zzzz, aaa, or Mieropoix. At least it is a word people actually use in conversation.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Mirepoix is an ordinary word in cooking, but it’s an uncountable noun and they’re inventing a fake plural, like “featherses”.

[–] Sanctus 5 points 11 months ago

Didnt it specifically say horsefeatherses in one of those comments? I start drawing the line there.

[–] joel_feila 1 points 11 months ago

I have never heard or seen mieropoix before.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Cromulent is a perfectly cromulent word.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Modern dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive. They don't tell you how things should be spelled, or what meaning they should have. Instead, they report how things are spelled and what people think they mean in the real world.

[–] RampantParanoia2365 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I knew Meriiam Webster was going to shit when they added "literally" as "figuratively" because people use it facetiously.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

That's the point of it, though. People use "literally" as "figuratively, and it should be recorded as such. It doesn't matter that it's facetious or ironic, it's still used that way commonly.