Come on man; zip line?
I’ve been hearing that word for as long as I can remember. What do they call it in the army? :dubious:
Same goes for earmark.
Merriam-Websters is running a business. I won’t be buying anything from them.
LOL! Missalette is the only one I had no clue for. And I grew up Catholic!
So I looked up “goji,” because all I could think was, “‘Five o’clock’ in Japanese?” Apparently it’s some kind of berry, but what’s odd is the entry says, “Date: 2003.” Shouldn’t it list 2009?
My WAG is the wire you slide down while holding onto two handles. You know, like they do in action flicks? I guy will throw a towel across a wire and slide all the way down to the ground? Or in the jungle, when they fly around in the trees.
Those of you trashing M-W, what is your dictionary of choice then? Someone already linked to a list of stupid shit in the OED, such as “bouncebackability” (which is not in M-W’s, by the way). Dictionary.com? Yeah there’s a source of scholarly preeminence.
They just figured out now that “earmark”, “zip-line”, and shwarma are words? And what’s with the three a’s in sh[a]warma? Two syllables: Shwar. Muh.
Butbutbut the OED has *Oxford *in the name! And English!
Personally, I go by the “I have a B.A. in English so I’m allowed to make up whatever the hell I want” dictionary.
Well, for something like “zip line”, there is a interesting question about when an adjective-noun or noun-noun phrase that is well understood takes on enough of a life in its compound form to be considered it’s own ‘word’, rather than a construct of two words.
Like milk bottle vs tetrafluoroethane bottle. The meanings of both are syntactically equivalent. But milk bottle is commonly used enough that it describes a certain thing in people’s minds as a unit.
At home, I have one heavy mother of a Random House Unabridged Dictionary. I think it dates from nineteen eighty-something. Not only does it have the best obscure words (floccinaucinihilipilification, anyone?) it’s great for lifting weights when you don’t have a barbell on hand.
V1-@-gra (vahy-@h-gruh): noun
A pill full of ALL NATURAL HERBAL SUPPLEMENTS that will ROCK your SEX LIFE. GUARANTEED!
From the Greek vay@grus meaning “one who adds 3 extra stadia to his member.”
Bill needed some V1@gra for his date this evening and could easily afford the monthly shipments at a low cost of $19.99
To answer some of these complaints, dictionaries don’t put in every bit of faddish slang. It has to demonstrate staying power.
So “date: 2003” makes sense; the first usage they have is 2003, but it wasn’t recognized as part of the language yet.
It also explains why so many of these words make you go, “they just added this now?”
I agree *staycation *is as stupid as neologisms get. I pledge never to use it except in conversations about the word.
Google asks if you mean shawarma when you type in shwarma.
Your preferred spelling still yields about 127,000 hits, while Merriam-Webster’s returns about 576,000.
The Wikipedia entry lists twelve variants, with Shawarma chosen as the title of the article. Since the word passed through a language (Arabic) which doesn’t use the Roman alphabet, there probably won’t be a standardized English-language spelling for a while. If anything, a purist should opt for the Turkish çevirme, the earliest known form of the word.
The Japanese copula です is usually pronounced something like des, but it’s still romanized as desu. The city where I live is pronounced something like *Mwaukee *or Muhwaukee, but it’s still spelled Milwaukee.