(5 Changes That Matter From the Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition.)

It’s unquestionably nostalgic but also unquestionably new. It means that you can hold the English language in your hands. 

Let’s explore some of the fun new entries in the Twelfth: 

adulting

We all know that nouns can become verbs in English. Sometimes we notice the shift, and sometimes we don’t: Most of us think nothing of the fact that we butter bread and we voice opposition and we iron clothes. Nouns more conventionally come from verbs–just think of walk and run. But it’s pretty rare that a noun comes from a verb that came from a noun, which is the case with adulting, derived from the verb to adult meaning “to behave like an adult.” The verb dates back to the early 1900s, while the new noun adulting surfaced in 2013, a high point of social media saturation. It’s a word that emerged while we narrated our lives while living them.

amirite

Texting and social media have made the informal language of others part of our daily lives in a way wholly unprecedented,  and the language has expanded accordingly. Terms like lit, bae, fomo, mood, stan, sus, and lowkey come from a new register of informal expression. It’s not just the compressed phonetic respelling, shorter for quick keying and perhaps a bit ironic in a knowing way, that distinguishes amirite; there’s a grammatical singularity about it, too, since it’s usually used as a tag question in social media posts. Amirite?

dad joke

Compound terms need to pass a simple test before being added to the dictionary. If a compound can be understood by consulting the definitions of its constituent parts, no new definition is needed. There is no entry for cattle ranch, for example, but there is one for dude ranch. A dad joke isn’t just a joke told by a dad—it has the specific qualities of wholesomeness, obviousness, and endearing corniness. 

fanfic

One of the inarguably positive things about social media has been the ability to find others who share one’s hobbies, habits, and passions. From knitting to gaming to collective fangirling and fanboying (two more newly added words), people have found a new way to share what they care about. The communities that both read and write fan fiction have given us another shortened term, fanfic, which can refer to both the genre and to a specific story, as in: “We wrote a fanfic about vampires who knit sweaters for fun.”

fluffernutter

Trademarks are a tricky thing for dictionaries. On the one hand, many trademarked terms are generically used to refer to things that correspond to the category, if not the specific brand, named by the trademark. You might be surprised to learn that escalator and dumpster and thermos began as trademarks. Still-active trademarks are only given usage indications rather than definitions, since only the trademark holder can legally say what their name refers to; this is the case for Jeep, Kleenex, and Xerox (when used as a noun). Fluffernutter, a sandwich made with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff, is among the newest and most delicious trademarks to become a dictionary entry.

free solo

The sport of rock climbing without ropes or safety equipment is specific enough to have its own name: free solo. It might have continued as an obscure and fairly specialized niche activity, but an Oscar-winning documentary film entitled Free Solo made it much more familiar to the general public.  

mediopassive

As language lovers and certified word nerds, we love seeing new linguistic terminology in the dictionary. Mediopassive names the way the subjects of some sentences receive, rather than perform, the actions of their verbs. Seen in such sentences as “The window opens easily,” “The house sold in four days,” and “The car drives smoothly,” it’s a curious sentence structure that is useful and efficient. Intransitive verbs used in such sentences are said to be in the mediopassive voice. 

non-rhotic

Some English speakers don’t pronounce the sound of the letter r before vowels or at the end of words–think the classic Boston accent, for example, but also many accents heard in Britain or the American South. An “r-less” accent is called non-rhotic by linguists. Rhotic derives from a Greek word that means “to use the /r/ sound excessively or incorrectly.”

petrichor (geosmin)

Petrichor is one of those words that for a long time was used mainly to cite itself. It was the answer to the question, “Did you know that there is a word for that distinctive smell after rainfall?” But petrichor has been used more and more frequently as the name for the smell, and is a welcome new addition to the dictionary. Another new word, geosmin, is the chemical compound that generates the petrichor smell.

side-eye

Side-eye (a word born in the late 18th century but only made common in this one) means “a sidelong glance that indicates scorn, suspicion, disapproval, or veiled curiosity.” It’s sometimes used with the, as in “She gave him the side-eye,” and it’s a verb, too, as in “They were side-eyeing us with envy.” This is a linguistically interesting case of a facial expression carrying a specific meaning, which isn’t the case for words like smile or frown. Those words might indicate emotions but don’t often have metonymic uses that can be substituted for the cause of the expression; giving someone the side-eye is often showing scorn, but giving someone a smile is just smiling. 

Check out the Twelfth Edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary here:

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The post 10 Fun Terms From Merriam-Webster’s Newly Updated Collegiate Dictionary appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(25 Common Writing Mistakes Writers Make.)

Many of those metaphors tucked inside a single word can be surprising, others picturesque or poetic, and still others are downright entertaining. The metaphors and lively stories behind such words are the kind I love sharing each week on the radio show and podcast “A Way with Words” and in my new book, Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland.

Here are some of my favorites, specifically selected for writers.

Magazine

Open up the word magazine, and you’ll find it comes into English via Middle French, and ultimately from the Arabic word makhāzin, which means “storehouses.” By the 17th century, magazine meant a place used for the storage of arms and munitions, and by the 18th, the word was applied to a publication that was a “storehouse” of articles on lots of topics. This also explains why the place where a gun’s ammunition is stored goes by the same name.

Lorem ipsum

The gibberish that serves as a placeholder while awaiting your pristine prose comes from a mangled passage of the great Roman orator Cicero. In De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, or “On the Ends of Good and Evil,” Cicero talks about the value of enduring short-term pain for a lasting payoff—just as we writers must do. Centuries later, some unknown typesetter later took that passage, which starts with dolorem ipsum, or “pain itself,” then scrambled some of the rest and started using it as dummy text, which looked real but ran no risk of being confused with regular text.

The practice was so handy it caught on. (By the way, that family name Cicero? It comes from the Latin word cicer, or “garbanzo bean,” apparently because one of Cicero’s predecessors had a bean-shaped growth on his nose. Latin cicer also found its way into English as garbanzo’s synonym, chickpea.)

Anthology

If your poem is included in an anthology, you can be doubly pleased that it’s part of a literary bouquet. One of the loveliest words in English, anthology in its most literal sense means a “gathering of flowers.” The word comes from Greek anthos, or “flower,” also found in such words as chrysanthemum, or “golden flower,” and anthurium, or “flower with a tail.”

Blurb

If you read the blurbs on the back of a book, you have one Belinda Blurb to thank. Belinda’s not a real person, though. She’s a clever invention by an author who used her as a marketing ploy to promote his latest book. In 1907, humorist Gelett Burgess wrote fake jacket copy for his new book and promoted it at a national gathering of booksellers. The gushing copy praised the contents of the book with breathless hyperbole, and above it all, in giant letters were the words: “YES, this is a ‘BLURB’! All the Other Publishers commit them. Why Shouldn’t We?”

Below that there was a picture of a woman with her hand cupped to the side of her mouth as if shouting, with a caption that read: MISS BELINDA BLURB IN THE ACT OF BLURBING. The effort paid off handsomely, and blurb became lodged in the language of publishing.

Spam

Wondering why that editor didn’t respond to your query? Or maybe you’re still waiting to hear back from a potential agent. In either case, maybe you should check your spam folder, and while you’re doing so, take a moment to reflect on this word’s amusing origin.

The idea of spam as “junk mail” goes back to a madcap British TV show from 1970 called “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” In one sketch, a couple goes out to breakfast and asks the short-order cook what’s on offer that day. The cook replies, “Well, there’s egg and bacon. Egg, sausage, and bacon. Egg and Spam. Egg, bacon, and Spam. Egg, bacon, sausage, and Spam. Spam, bacon, sausage, and Spam. Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon, and Spam—” at which point, some Vikings also who happen to be in the restaurant (don’t ask), break into a loud, lusty song about the wonders of spam. (Search for “Monty Python,” “Spam,” and “ridiculous” online and you watch all the silliness and sing along yourself.)

A few years later, after someone mistakenly sent the same email to hundreds of people, the term spam took on the added meaning of something as repetitive and unappetizing as the spam in the comedy sketch.

Cocktail

At the end of a long day of writing, maybe you’re ready for a cocktail. But did you ever wonder how that drink got its name? Etymologists suspect it derives from the fact that the word cocktail originally applied to a horse with a docked tail—that is, with the tail cropped so short the hairs stood up perkily like the tail of a rooster or cock. Unlike thoroughbreds, cocktails were unpedigreed, working horses.

Around the same time, in the early 1800s, mixed drinks were regarded with some disdain because they were adulterated—after all, why dilute perfectly good booze with other ingredients? Over time, people began likening those watered-down beverages to less-than-purebred horses, and the name cocktail stuck.

Banana problem

One last term every writer should have in their vocabulary: banana problem. If you have a banana problem, you’re unsure whether something is finished. Maybe you’ve rewritten the same sentence way too many times when you should have stopped 20 minutes ago or tossed one too many pinches of salt into a perfectly good broth. 

In the tech world, the term banana problem denotes badly written code for terminating a computer process. This handy expression was inspired by the joke about a little kid who insisted, “I know how to spell ‘banana’. I just don’t know when to stop!” 

Check out Martha Barnette’s Friends With Words here:

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The post 7 Fun Word Origins Every Writer Should Know appeared first on Writer's Digest.

This infographic is courtesy of Jennifer Frost of GrammarCheck. Visit them online at grammarcheck.net or check out the free online grammar checker at grammarcheck.net/editor for proofreading help. 

Baihley Grandison is the assistant editor of Writer’s Digest and a freelance writer. Follow her on Twitter @baihleyg, where she mostly tweets about writing (Team Oxford Comma!), food (HUMMUS FOR PRESIDENT, PEOPLE), and Random Conversations With Her Mother.

The post 18 Words You Didn’t Know You Needed appeared first on Writer's Digest.

This infographic is part of Merriam-Webster’s series on slang in the dictionary. To read the article that accompanies this piece, click here.

Need to check how you’re using new words? Try Grammarly (it’s free)

Baihley Grandison is the assistant editor of Writer’s Digest and a freelance writer. Follow her on Twitter @baihleyg, where she mostly tweets about writing (Team Oxford Comma!), food (HUMMUS FOR PRESIDENT, PEOPLE), and Random Conversations With Her Mother.

The post How Does a Word Get Into the Dictionary? appeared first on Writer's Digest.

This infographic is courtesy of Jennifer Frost of GrammarCheck. Visit them online at grammarcheck.net or check out the free online grammar checker at grammarcheck.net/editor for proofreading help. 

Baihley Grandison is the assistant editor of Writer’s Digest and a freelance writer. Follow her on Twitter @baihleyg, where she mostly tweets about writing (Team Oxford Comma!), food (HUMMUS FOR PRESIDENT, PEOPLE), and Random Conversations With Her Mother.

The post 33 Common Words & Phrases You Might Be Saying Wrong appeared first on Writer's Digest.