It pays to increase your word power

As a child, I was an avid consumer of Reader's Digest. 

Oh, we also got Newsweek, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post, which I equally devoured. I even read the monthly rags from the American Legion and the VFW, which had nothing of particular interest in them. Not to mention the kids' magazines we subscribed to Jack and Jill, Calling All Girls, Boy's Life, Seventeen... But there was something special about Reader's Digest, such a weird amalgam of self-help, health, Cold War military boosterism, celebrity profile, muscular Protestant Christianity (tempered by articles in which we ecumenically learned that Catholics and Jews were okay, too). And I loved the regular features: "My Most Unforgettable Character," "Drama in Real Life," and the little snippets of "Humor in Uniform," "Life in These United States." 

(I always thought my cousin Ellen should have submitted her funny story about the time that eight-year-old Ellen was berating her two-year-old brother Mike, yelling at him "You're acting like a two-year-old," before catching herself and adding, "Oh, yeah, you ARE a two-year old." It may not be too late, Ellen. They may still take submissions!)

But one of my favorite parts of Reader's Digest was "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power," a vocabulary quiz that helped you increase your, well, word power. Or at least your vocabulary. 

I don't recall learning any specific word from this feature, but I remember taking the quiz each month, eager to see how many of the words I already knew. We were readers, my family. Story tellers. Talkers. We had a lot of words. And although I never liked it when I missed an answer, I liked picking up a new word here and there.

Ah, words...

At some point in the 1960's, there was a TV game show, "Call My Bluff," in which panelists gave definitions of obscure words and people had to guess which one was correct. We adopted it for home play, and I remember thumbing through the dictionary to pick up obscure words. One I nabbed was "prepuce." Another word for foreskin. (Which I probably had to look up.) Anyway, I took a pass on that one. 

Oddly, given what word nuts we were, my family didn't own Scrabble, but we did have the poor man's version - Key Word - which we avidly played. Later, after I was an adult, my mother got Boggle - you toss out a jumble of letters and make words out of them - which we played quite a bit. 

My mother was a pro word-gamer. Crossword puzzles, acrostics, diagram-less puzzles (crossword puzzles without the template of numbered boxes). Aside from diagram-less puzzles, which I never mastered, I liked books of word games, too. At some point, however, I switched over to Sudoku. (Sorry, Ma, but I think you would have liked it.) 

Freshman year in high school, part of our English class was devoted to a vocabulary text book called Word Wealth. 

Word Wealth (and DIY "Call My Bluff") aside, I would often sit as a kid and thumb through the dictionary just soaking up all those words. My "big" Christmas present in eighth grade was a hard-covered dictionary of my very own. (Talk about hard core nerd.)

So, a long-winded way to talk about how much I have always enjoyed words - having them, using them. Thus, I am delighted when a dictionary publishes the new words that they've added to their offering for the year. 

Dictionary.com has recently announced its updates for 2021.

What's new?

Ghost kitchen (delivery only restaurants). Oof (a wonderful interjection that more than replaces  ow and ouch). Side hustle (source of income to augment what you're making on your day job). Zaddy (sexy guy, often older). Yeet (a substitute for an enthusiastically exclaimed Yes!).

Who knows what staying power any of these will have. As long as so many jobs pay so little, and as long as people with an okay-paying job want to escape the 9-5 routine, side hustle likely has legs. Zaddy I find kind of creepy. But I hope I'm still oof-ing years from now.

Overall, dictionary.com added 231 new words, 65 new definitions to existing entries, and 925 revised definitions. 

Some of the newbies (alas) are pandemic-relate: long COVID, long hauler. We all hope that we neither have nor become either. 

There are a few new words dealing with racial justice. These include the initialism DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), which I was familiar with from my work on the corporate front. (I do some writing work for an organization that does corporate leadership development, and DEI is a big deal.) I wasn't familiar with JEDI, which adds justice to the mix. I guess mixing up the letters is better than just tagging J on to the end of DEI and ending up with something that looks like it should be pronounced "deige". But JEDI? Really? Even a decidedly non-Star Wars (or is it Star Trek?) fan is going to think the force being with you when the word Jedi is invoked. Anyway, I've ghost-written a few blog posts on DEI for my client, and JEDI has never popped up. Maybe next year.

Turning to January 6th, domestic terrorism is now in the dictionary. Wonder if they'll have to update it after September 18th, when the Proud Boys and their ilk are planning an other attempt to restore Trump to the presidency. (Can't wait.)

Given my client in the corporate learning world, I was a bit amused to see that the definitions of asynchronous and synchronous have been updated to include their use in remote learning. Asynch: learn on your own schedule; synch: learn with others in real time.

Also on the tech-ish - though political as much as tech-ish - front, dictionary added deplatformed. As in, it's a shame that Twitter didn't deplatform TFG (the former guy) sooner. 

Speaking of TFG, other words added this year were asshat and shitshow, which dictionary.com gently represents as a**hat and sh*tshow. 

Y'all, which I will never ever use, now has a dictionary entry of its own. Apparently, you guys is too gendered. Me? I think y'all is way too regional. And not my region. They did give a nod to the Northeast, updating the entry for youse.

Youse, which actually came over from Ireland on the coffin ships, is, IMHO, best used in conjunction with "youse guys." But unfortunately, youse to me makes you sound like a moron. So I'm sticking with you guys. Y'all? Don't ask? Way too Bull Connor or Hee Haw to my liking.

Still and all, I do think it pays to increase your word power. How about youse?

Source for new words:  Dictionary.com