PEREGRINATIONS


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So I'm proofreading a dictionary. That's right, a dictionary. I won't go into the how, the why: for the purposes of this short essay, you simply need to understand that I'm engaged in a kind of late-in-the-process corrections check of the manuscript of a dictionary.

Actually it's a children's dictionary, a children's dictionary being updated by a major publisher of books for children. I should mention that.

In the process of checking this manuscript for stray errors (very few that I saw, I might add, with the one memorable one being the misspelling of "wriggling" as "riggling"), I was privileged to see the copy on which it had been indicated that certain new words and their definitions would be added, and others would, to make the necessary space without altering the pagination, be removed.

Behold then those hot newcomers, those palabras of tomorrow, essential for the brains of twenty-first century youth. And along with them, those lexical oldsters who have outstayed their welcome.

Say hello to

• dinette
• DVD
• gigagbyte
• e-commerce
• home page

Bid farewell to

• clobber
• dingbat
• elocution
• girder
• gelato

Welcome to

• in-line skates
• homeschool (transitive verb, as in "Mommy says she's going to homeschool me to protect me from Charles Darwin")

Good riddance

• gibbon
• inquest

We heart

• kickboxing
• multivitamin
• screen saver

We spurn

• penultimate
• scatterbrained
• snooty and swanky (both of you! out!)

Shall we have a picture of a swallow?

NO! Strike it out! Make way for a beautiful SUV!

A snowflake? The hell with that! Put in a snowboard!

No room for hawthorn, misfit, mollycoddle, or jailbird; we need that valuable real estate for V-Chip, synchronized swimming, and extreme sports.

A gleam of hope: somebody had tried to sneak vee-jay into the record. As in "video DJ." But it didn't quite make it.

Now, you kids get those bikes off my lawn!

posted by BT, May 30, 2001