The times they are a-changin'

Recently I've been alerted to the new inclusions in the latest version of the Oxford English Dictionary. In keeping with my previous blog entry, appetites for documenting language change are very strong – regardless of whether we're looking at historical linguistics; or looking at the present or the near future to see where we're heading. So what do the new words for June 2013 tell us about the zeitgeist and who we are? 

Well, from the 1200 new or amended words, it's hardly surprising that media reports have tended to focus on terms such as crowdsourcing, flash mob, geekery and terms related to social media – follow and follower, for example. To me, such examples demonstrate media outlets' own intentions to be cutting edge, on trend – or another vacuous term to separate the leaders from the easily led. Other terms not in the spotlight seem to have been in widespread usage for a great deal longer – head space, jolly hockey sticks or live blog. This is because the policy adopted when compiling lists of new words saw fit to only include those words that had already been in use for a certain period of time. That policy has now changed slightly, as revealed by the dictionary's Chief Editor, John Simpson:

"The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on."

To include a term purely because it "[...] seems to be catching on" is rather misguided, in my view. Twitter may prove itself as a durable social media platform. However, as we have seen with other portals and sites; it may yet be superseded by a brighter, better, platform. This process would then have given undue prominence to a piece of ephemera unable to hold its own. Similarly, any dictionary can only document usage retrospectively. If you compile a dictionary this month, it can only be a record of language usage from June 2013 and earlier. At least if a word has flourished for ten years, speakers have assigned it a value and a purpose.

But by concentrating on all that is new, we do not have the full story. If the latest imprint of the second edition of the OED now contains a total of 823,000 entries, who is documenting those words and phrases deemed to have fallen out of common usage altogether? What do we know about these words? Surely it is the relationship between neologisms and these obsolete words and phrases that best illustrates how a language is gradually changing? It will be this information that tells us the most about how certain social and cultural forces dominate others through language, and – since neologisms generally arise from a communicative need not adequately addressed by language to date – even how effective a language is as a means of communication for the people it serves.