New dictionary is lovely jubbly!
Bada bing – the catchphrase made famous by hit US television show The Sopranos – has won a place alongside 3000 other new entries in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English.
Reality TV, SARS and muggle have also been added to the tome … the largest one-volume dictionary of English, the book’s publishers said at its release on Thursday.
The Oxford dictionary describes bada bing also bada bing bada boom as an exclamation to emphasise that something will happen effortlessly and predictably. The word is also the name of a strip club in the Soprano crime drama.
Not to be outdone, British television produced lovely jubbly – an expression of delight – from the vintage comedy Only Fools and Horses. While Basil Brush’s cry of Boom boom! is now an officially sanctioned way to whip up a more lusty response to a bad joke.
|
Muppet has come to mean a foolish or incompetent person |
The word Muppet, from Jim Henson’s classic children’s series, has come to mean a foolish or incompetent person, the dictionary says.
From pop culture comes Boy and Girl bands, bootylicious and turntablist, a DJ proficient at spinning records.
Webwords
Another trove of new words is the Internet, which added cyberslacker, egosurf and hacktivist to the dictionary, which concentrates on the living language, and is separate from the more established and multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary.
Though some entries may perplex and infuriate linguistic purists, the dictionary’s publishers say words are only included if they are well-known and have proven they can pass the test of time.
They said texts including comics, newspapers, TV scripts, novels, scholarly journals and the web are all scoured as fonts for new words.