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A new year, and the new words keep coming!
29 January, 2010
I’ve blogged before about new words that are entering the lexicon and recently the Oxford English Dictionary revealed some of the latest ones on a list of potential words to be included in their future editions. With social networking sites affecting so many people’s lives these days, it was not really surprising that the words ’defriend’ and ’unfriend’ – terms for scratching acquaintances from your Facebook profile – are included. ’Tweetup’ is another word associated with a social networking site, this time Twitter, of course.
Also on the list are ’staycation’ (taking holidays at home to save money) and ’paywall’, the point on a website where you have to start paying for content (I’ll delve into this topic at a later date).
A team of lexicographers trawled through more than two billion words to pluck out a few hundred for inclusion. What a job! You’d have to love the language and all its fascinating intricacies to do that and, in some senses, that’s what you have to do as a writer – pluck out the most appropriate word to get your message across… though maybe not from a list of two billion! It is said that in a lifetime an average person will learn and know at most about 10,000 words. Shakespeare had a vocabulary of between 20,000 and 25,000!
I might sound like a broken record, but it’s imperative as a writer that you conscientiously work on expanding your vocabulary, by learning (by rote, if necessary) new words every day (or at least one daily). How do you do this? You can, like me, compile your own ’dictionary’, writing down words you come across in books you’ve read that you don’t the meaning of. I’ve been a professional writer for 30 years and, even now, see it as essential to keep learning new words. My new year’s resolution this year is to learn five a day, and so far, so good!
Happy writing!
GARY