Evidently it was quite fortuitous. Just couple of days after MTV's Video Music Awards, Oxford Dictionaries Online released its quarterly list of the new words it was adding. To the delight of the media, there was "twerk" at the top, which gave them still another occasion to link a story to Miley Cyrus's energetic high jinks.
And why not add "twerk"? It's definitely a cool word, which worked its way from New Orleans bounce music into the linguistic mainstream on the strength of its expressive phonetics, among other things. It won't linger — the names of dance styles rarely do — but we'll have a historical record of it in the section reserved for forgotten forbidden dances, along with "lambada" and "turkey trot." Now that dictionaries are online, space is unlimited; you're never going to have to ask the outdated words to give up their spots to make room for the new ones coming on.
All the dictionaries periodically release a list of their new words, most of them provocatively cute and fleeting. Chambers Dictionary announces they've got "mocktail." Merriam's counters with "man cave." Collins includes "squadoosh," an Italian-American slang word that means "zilch." And Oxford's recent list included "selfie," "fauxhawk" and the exclamations "derp!" and "squee!," not to mention the abbreviation SRSLY, as in "seriously." If you haven't picked up on all of these yet, I wouldn't worry. None of them is likely to outlive your hamster.
True, the dictionaries are also adding durable new items like "cloud computing," "systemic risk" and baseball's "walk off." (It mystifies me that it took 150 years to come up with a word for that.) But it's the ephemeral and faddish ones that generate the most arresting media headlines: "It's official! Oxford declares 'selfie' a real word!"
The dictionaries themselves disavow any official role in defining a "real word" — these are just items that we've been noticing a lot, they say. But they know perfectly well that the only reason the announcements get picked up is that people still believe that dictionaries are gatekeepers whose inclusion of a word confers approval.
There was a time when dictionaries were expected to restrict themselves to words that had reputable literary credentials. Back in 1961, Merriam-Webster set off a cultural firestorm for opening the columns of its new unabridged to parvenus like "litterbug," "wise up" and "yakking." Critics accused Merriam's of "subversion" and "sabotage," and The New York Times charged that the dictionary was accelerating the deterioration of the language.
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