Gameiac Maniac

     There’s a fun new article on Mashable.com titled “OMG, the Oxford English Dictionary Added New Words! We ‘Heart” It! LOL!”  So, OMG, maybe the dictionary’s editor is just a Valley Girl at ‘heart,’ you know?

     OMG and LOL, along with FYI, are all, according to the OED, “initialisms associated with the language of electronic communications.”  It’s interesting to note that the first use of OMG dates back to a 1917 letter and in 1960 LOL meant “little old lady.”  Official recognition for a word seems to be as slow as the beatification process.  Who knew?

     A symbol for the verb “love,” the heart sign “may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper stickers.”  In the future, we should brace ourselves for a flood of new entries based on the new social media.

     There are many other new entries you can check out for yourself by clicking here.  My favorites are “doughnut hole,” a dessert made from the cut out center of a doughnut, and “muffin top,”  defined as “a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers.”  Too many of the first can definitely lead to the second.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 5:52 am and is filed under Comm361, Online Journalism, Student Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.