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'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary
- pringk02 1y agoThere is an article of this kind every year where we all get a chance to be up in arms about the fact that language and culture is ever-shifting and changing and not something static.
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoThe comments here really remind of the usual debate around Wikipedia. Some people really want to see these tools as guardian and judge determining what should be worthy of inclusion rather than tools describing a reality external to them. Maybe old age really is a shipwreck after all.
- immibis 1y agoWikipedia is a guardian and judge, whether it wants to be or not. Look how quickly politicians changed their policies after Wikipedia stopped bothsidesing the Gaza war. There were endless arguments on talk pages about how it shouldn't be called the "Israel-Hamas war" any more, since it's converted into a genocide of one side only. For more than a year. And then suddenly, once they agreed to change it, within only a couple of months, politicians across the USA and Europe start sanctioning Israel for committing a genocide. The same politicians who all the rest of the time said there was no genocide. Wikipedia is more powerful than it thinks.
- JambalayaJimbo 1y agoAre you sure you’re not mixing up cause and effect here?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deafpolygon 1y agoOk Cambridge just lost a significant amount of credibility in my eyes.
- janmarsal 1y agothey're just competing with the urban dictionary for relevance and rizz
- treetalker 1y agoOof. Cambridge has zero aura. I'll stick with my physical Compact OED and 1942 Webster's New International, thanks.
- h4ch1 1y agoIs this "progress" or are we glorifying moving backwards by including this sort of language just to be "in"? I really don't know how to feel about this, maybe it's my education making me bigoted, looking down upon what's clearly ephemeral; slang words like these come and go with time, and I think the timeframe for words to be included in the dictionary has greatly reduced. Almost no one apart from a very small, terminally online subset of people will ever use these words and an even smaller subset will use these in IRL conversation; adding these is a bad idea and doesn't bode well for dictionaries wrt credibility. They should release a DLC for dictionaries that covers slang like this, not make it part of the official English specification.
- s_trumpet 1y agoDictionaries are not specs for the English language, they are wikis. Twenty years later when “delulu” (a word popular enough that my 65 year old father regularly uses it) has fallen out of style, new readers would find it very useful to get the word defined in the dictionary.
- h4ch1 1y agoFair enough, I've personally looked at dictionaries along with thesauri as a spec rather than a wiki; but your anecdote makes sense.
- DonHopkins 1y agoLLMi are the new thesauri.
- Piskvorrr 1y ago- terminally online - DLC - IRL As in, "things that happened before my Xth year of life are Normal, nay, Traditional even. Everything afterwards is Ephemeral, and possibly Heresy as well." Alas! All is ephemeral.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rufus_foreman 1y agoYour mission for the week, should you choose to accept it, is to get one (or more) of the "words" tradwife, delulu, or broligarchy used in the acceptance criteria of one of your JIRA stories in progress without it being noticed or commented on in any way.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoSome of those I have never heard, which makes me think they're jumping the gun. But I'm surprised that work wife wasn't already in the dictionary.
- more_corn 1y agoI quit
- morjom 1y agoDon't "regular" dictionaries like the Cambridge and Oxford ones usually avoid adding slang?
- cjs_ac 1y agoThe second paragraph of the article: > Delulu, tradwife, broligarcy, and lewk, have all been added because experts believe the words will not be just a fad, but will have linguistic staying power.
- lucideer 1y agoThe fact they've included that paragraph doesn't invalidate the question. Cambridge used to add ~500, maybe as many as 1000 words annually. In recent years it's climbed to 2000 but 6000 is rather unprecedented.
- TillE 1y agoI think despite having lived through it, it's easy to miss just how transformative smartphones and social media have been to human society. There's been an absolute explosion in communication. In the early years of the internet it was pretty exciting and novel to be able to talk to people from other countries. Now it's completely unremarkable. All this of course has a huge effect on how language develops and is used, and really we're still in the early years of it all (I guess The Smartphone Era starts around 2010 or so).
- serf 1y agocounterpoint: i've been on my phone/social/media/etc through the entire trend and this is the only time i've ever read the word 'delulu'; I had to look it up. Might I suggest that tribe matters a lot in this context? I don't listen to k-pop, I don't watch machinima, and I only knew 'tradwife' from the bullshit politics associated with the concept.. I think Cambridge called these too early. Maybe i'm old, and maybe i'm sheltered, but I never hear these words used in real life aside from a young nephew who was into the toilet thing, and he didn't so much use the word as just scream SKIBIDI while dancing around the room. I'm fine with being old. Some trends you prefer to see sail away from you.
- xdfgh1112 1y agoWeird. Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reeks of capitalising on the zeitgeist for PR
- qn9n 1y ago> The Oxford English Dictionary is often considered the more authoritative source on the English language, whereas the Cambridge Dictionary focuses more on modern usage.
- Steven420 1y agoDictionaries are no longer a reliable source of information just click bait bs
- umeshunni 1y agoYeah - this makes me very curious about the longevity of previous 'words of the year'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_the_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_the_year
- TillE 1y agoI've definitely heard "delulu" years ago, probably floating around Twitter. There's a Wikipedia article on the word for some reason, and it supports this.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reels of capitalising the zeitgeist for PR Delulu is more than a decade old. > it's a physical dictionary after all Is the Cambridge Dictionary still physical-first? I know the OED has been digital-first since at least around the turn of the millenium (the last full physical edition was in 1989.)
- 3836293648 1y agoThe OED has been what since when? How was their website so utterly unusable for so many years then? That's the entire reason I use the Cambridge now
- DaSHacka 1y agoThe absolute state Hoe embarrassing
- 4gotunameagain 1y agoFreudian slip ? xD
- DaSHacka 1y agoReally sussin typo frfr, got inspo by the skibidi broligarchy to lewk at a bussin tradwife