By bbr

by Sarah Warlick, content director

Cat café

Each year, language lovers enjoy celebrating and sometimes criticizing the brand new words that have been added to the dictionary. These are words and phrases that have been used in small niches of society for varying amounts of time, but have recently grown in popularity enough to spread into common use in the wider world. Eventually usage expands to the point that the arbiters of language at the Oxford English Dictionary feel a responsibility to recognize them as legitimate words and officially add them to the lexicon.

Because of their evolution, the newly approved words often relate to the specific realms of the original users; the internet, food and societal themes and changes tend to be well represented. This year is no exception, with just-crowned terms that include cupcakery, Redditor and microaggression. Fresh entries for 2015 range from the practical hangry (hungry enough to be seriously cranky) to the political Grexit (the possibility of Greece leaving the Eurozone) and even the just plain silly pwnage (a word taken from youthful video gamers describing gleeful domination of an opponent).

A few more of this year’s official dictionary words include:

• Pocket dial: the act of accidentally making a call on a cell phone in one’s pocket
• Cat café: one of the (real) businesses that provide cats for the pleasure of visitors
• Manspreading: an offensive act of spreading the legs wide to take up more than one’s fair share of a shared seating area (usually on public transport)
• Beer o-clock or wine o’clock: well we all know what time that is…
• Awesomesauce: superlatively wonderful, of course!
• Fatshaming: being purposely hurtful or critical of a person of substance
• Social justice warrior: a somewhat derogatory term for someone that espouses and/or works toward progressive change in society
• Butthurt: offended to an unreasonable degree
• Snackable: a small, easily digested portion, whether food or media

That’s only a partial listing, but it should give us all fodder for protracted and highly opinionated conversation. Which are truly legitimate and which have no right to hang around with the real words? Which have you been using since I was in diapers and which would you never be caught dead uttering? Better yet, what are the words that you firmly believe should have been included instead of those that were actually selected? Take a stand! I think your ideas are the absolute awesomesauciest.