Your bromance is official, and you want to share it with the world, including those uppity English major friends of yours.
Thanks to the new Oxford English Dictionary, your relationship’s term is now an actual word.
Over 2,000 words and phrases were added to the dictionary last week, among them bromance, cheeseball, defriend, buzzkill, chillax, interweb and wardrobe malfunction. A senior assistant to the dictionary told Reuters that the additions are based on their popularity and quantity of use, which perhaps explains the additions of vuvuzela and staycation. Oxford was behind the times with staycation, seeing as Merriam-Webster added it in a 2009 update, along with such classics as vlog and green-collar.
Unfortunately, there were a few words and phrases still not popular enough to be added, such as tanorexia, cankles and twetiquette. Words added must be used in multiple independent places over a certain period of time to earn their place, a rule put in place by the overseeing editors of the dictionary.
The changes seem to be made to keep up with changing times and colloquialisms, but do we really need chillax and frenemy in our dictionary? These trendy words don’t have much of a chance over time, and just because people say these things frequently doesn’t necessarily mean we need to make them “real” words. UrbanDictionary.com already covers those bases, and the majority of us probably don’t even own a paper-and-glue dictionary anyway — we look it up online. Besides, when did a word have to be in a dictionary for people to use it?
On the Oxford English Dictionary’s website, the top of the page reads, “The definitive record of the English language.”
Once upon a time, the writer J.R.R. Tolkien was an editor of the dictionary. The current chief editor, John Simpson, seems highly passionate about words, going off the two paragraphs he spends talking excitedly about the history of the word “restaurant” and finding the earliest usages of the word. The OED has a reputation as being the etymological record of English and was not to be taken lightly, at least not before last week.
While it may be fun to sigh about your boyfriend’s bromance to your friends or call a girl out on her wardrobe malfunction, those usages generally aren’t formal — when “defriend” shows up in your dissertation, then we can start taking the word seriously.
The most disappointing part of this update is the fact that once a word has been put in the dictionary, it can never be removed. Therefore, bromance will forever haunt the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, whether it keeps its current popularity or not. Thanks, Paul Rudd.
English is currently one of the most difficult languages to learn. As proud American English speakers, we should certainly hold onto such an accomplishment. But maybe it’s time we start taking the English language a little more seriously and encourage our frenemies at Oxford to do the same.
Share those bromantic frenemy stories at amurrell@asu.edu
