Don’t know what FOMO stands for? Yeah, me either. (Psst… old folks! It means, “Fear of Missing Out.”) Good thing it is one of the sixty-five new entries in the venerable Oxford English Dictionary. As you will see, many of them are from the virtual world. Among my favorites, which originated on Reddit, is TL;DR (Too long; did not read.) Some of this year’s entries have met with howls of outrage among the literati, but we would all do well to remember the wise counsel of Jorge Luis Borges who said that “language is not, as we are led to suppose by the dictionary, the invention of academicians or philologists. Rather, it has been evolved through time…by peasants, by fishermen, by hunters, by riders.” Say that over and over to yourself when you understand that “twerk” is now an officially recognized word:
verb
[no object] informal
Here are a few of those new entries. Do you know your emoji from your omnishambles? WELL, DO YOU?