Why Modern English is Adorkable

Following on from Selfie and Tweep, Adorkable is the newest word to be added to the Collins English Dictionary.

Apparently it means someone nerdy in a cute way.. think Jesse Eisenberg and Zooey Deschanel.

You might wonder why our official dictionaries now accept ‘teen lingo’ as new additions to the beautiful, celebrated and widely-used language more renowned for the carefully crafted textures of Shakespeare?

It actually came about when Collins asked the Twitterati (those much-talked-about power users of Twitter) to vote for their favourite internet term to be added to their dictionary – ‘adorkable’, unbelievable as it may seem, came out top with 30% of the vote.

Second and fourth in the vote were ‘felfie’, which is a selfie by farmer, and ‘nomakeupselfie’, a nod to the recent Breast Cancer awareness social media trend.

The internet is quite the perfect place for new language to thrive, isn’t it? Mixing up street slang with celebrated prose, unhindered by rules and regulation. With limited characters on Twitter and instant messaging, the modern generation is constantly inventing new lingo to keep up with this fast-paced and limited character-span lifestyle.

It only seems right for the official dictionaries to keep up with the times, or they’ll just become old and boring and stuff, innit?

Lets just take a moment to appreciate these brilliant new official dictionary entries..

– Bromance (N. a close but non-sexual relationship between two men)

– Emoji (N. a small digital image used to express an idea or emotion)

– FOMO (N. fear of missing out)

– Guyliner (N. eyeliner that is wore by men)

– Muggle (N. a person that is not conversant with a particular skill. Origin: used in the Harry Potter books by JK Rowling)

– Selfie (N. a photograph that one has taken of oneself)

– Srsly (Adv. short for seriously)

– Tweeps (N. a persons follower’s on Twitter)

– Unfriend (V. remove someone from a list of friends on a social networking website)

Language has always been about evolution, there’s nothing new there. Shakespeare’s plays are splattered with ridiculous made-up words.

But now the internet has the power to help new words spread like wildfire.

The average Joe can simply come up with a new word, it gets a few retweets, he adds it to Urban Dictionary and it can crop up all over the internet until…hey presto – we have a new officially recognised word.

It’s quite empowering to think that anyone has the power to change language so quickly.. and ain’t that just grand?

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