Adonis Diaries

Archive for August 23rd, 2014

OxfordDictionaries.com adds

neckbeard, Yolo, listicle, humblebrag, binge-watch and side-boob as it sees rise in use due to social media use

Do you humblebrag about your neckbeard and sideboob? How adorbs.

The latest intake of works to OxfordDictionaries.com show how language emerging on social media and the internet are increasingly entering common use.

New entires include humblebrag, which refers to a post or comment made by someone that boasts about an achievement in the same sentence as a self-deprecating comment.

Abbreviations that are often used on sites such as Twitter, where the number of characters that can be posed are limited, are also among the new entrants.

These include adorbs, an adjective that is popular that means something is cute or adorable, and Yolo, favourite with teenagers which is an acronym of You Only Live Once.

Listicle refers to an internet article presented in the form of a numbered or bullet-pointed list.

According to OxfordDictionaries.com’s language monitoring programme, the use of binge-watch increased fourfold in February and tripled in June, based on its average use over the last two years.

They said there were spikes around the releases of House Of Cards season two in February 2014 and Orange Is The New Black season two in June 2014.

Changes in our media consumption habits also have also seen hate-watch – watching a programme for the sake of the enjoyment derived from mocking or criticising it – being added to the list of new words.

Technology in general has a strong influence on the English language, with other new entires including acquihire, clickbait, Deep Web, dox, fast follower, geocache, in silico, octocopter, responsive, smartwatch, and tech-savvy.

The Oxford Corpus reveals an approximate tenfold increase in usage of the terms vape and e-cig in the last two years, as electronic devices which enable people to inhale smokeless nicotine vapour have become increasingly widespread.

E-cigarette, added to OxfordDictionaries.com in August 2012, has seen an even sharper rise in usage.

However, despite the fact that e-cigarettes were not commercially available until the 21st century, the word vaping dates to 1983, when it was used to describe a hypothetical smoking device being considered at the time.

Other informal or slang terms added include bank of mum and dad, bro hug, cray, hench, hot mess, mansplain, side-eye, side boob and spit-take.

The abbreviation cray – meaning crazy – seems to have arisen initially in the reduplicated form cray cray in the early 2000s, but it was popularised in its single-syllable form when used by Kanye West in the hook to a track from his collaboration album with Jay Z.

New words, senses, and phrases are added to OxfordDictionaries.com once editors have gathered enough independent evidence from a range of sources to be confident that they have widespread currency in English.

Oxford Dictionaries editor Katherine Connor Martin said: “One of the advantages of our unique language monitoring programme is that it enables us to explore how English language evolves differently across the world.

“Naturally, many words are used in similar frequencies in the UK and US, for instance the informal additions amazeballs and neckbeard.

“However, some new slang and informal words catch on much more quickly in a particular variety of English-for instance, in our monitoring sample, side boob is more than 10 times more common in the UK than in the US (although this is due in part to its frequent use in the British media), whereas adorbs is used about four times more often in the US as in the UK.”

Amazeballs means impressive or very enjoyable.

The new entries mentioned above have been added to OxfordDictionaries.com, not the Oxford English Dictionary.

 Jamil BERRY posted on FB

COMMUNIQUER

Lorsque j’étais gosse, rentrant de l’école par une journée d’hiver, les ruelles du vieux Saïda étaient un peu sombres et je me rappelle que voyant se profiler la silhouette imposante d’un passant, cela m’insécurisait à tel point qu’arrivé à hauteur de ce dernier, je lui disais ” Bonsoir monsieur ” et quand il me répondait, toute ma peur se dissipait parce que je considérais que je l’ai démystifié.

C’était l’enfance .

Des reliquats de ce trait de comportement nous restent accrochés à l’âge adulte . C’est du moins ce que je pense car si vous croyez démystifier quelqu’un pour avoir eu le privilège de communiquer avec lui , vous vous trompez lourdement.

Le piège de la communication est la “banalisation” de la personne avec laquelle nous avons communiqué.

Le pire c’est l’effet boomerang qui vous revient par ricochet , comme par exemple le fait de vous sentir inutile dans la vie de quelqu’un qui est heureux .

Auriez vous omis de penser que s’il est heureux c’est quelque part
grâce à vous ? …

Bonsoir …

( Jamil BERRY )

To Jewish friends: “I waited for you to inquire about my family in Gaza”
And Visiting Auschwitz and Dachau.
Lots of blood has been spilled in your name and for your privilege.
Nazi dehumanized the Jews. Zionist Israel dehumanized the Palestinians.

To my Jewish friend (you know who you are) I waited for you to inquire about my family…you didn’t.
Not even a private message, not a phone call.
I checked your Facebook page, wow…not one post about the massacres in Gaza.
Some dinner party shots, something about ISIS and Syria but nothing about Gaza.
Even though, it has been bombed for three weeks IN YOUR NAME. I waited for you to ask how I was coping, you didn’t. I cope better on some days than others.
I try to keep busy and I only sleep when I crash.
My grandfather’s house was partly bombed, but like Gaza it is still standing…for now.
Our land was destroyed…lots of new trees gone, old trees gone, but who cares about trees when lives are shattered. I waited for you to ask, but you didn’t.
My cousins spent the night on the eve of Eid huddled with their children under the kitchen sink as three bombs were dropped from an F16 over the apartment building they were seeking shelter in.
They ‘survived’ although that word is open for interpretation.
Over two thousand people killed mostly civilians …. entire neighbourhoods demolished bombed… but you didn’t ask.
All I can say is next time you visit Israel and enjoy yourself think of this: lots of blood has been spilled in your name and for your privilege.
Viviane Ghoussoub's photo.

Yasir Qadhi posted on FB this August 19, 2014

In 2010, I visited the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, and saw first hand how Hitler and his Reich attempted to exterminate all those who opposed them (Jews, socialists, gypsies, etc.).

I was extremely fortunate to meet some of the last surviving Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz, and was mesmerized by their harrowing tales.

They told us how the Nazis had dehumanized the Jews so that it was then possible to commit acts of genocide against them.

I found these survivors to be brave and fearless, and I always felt that they would not support the current policies of Israel against the Palestinians.

In a previous posting a few weeks ago, I mentioned how Israel is following some of the very same tactics that Nazi Germany did, in dehumanizing Palestinians.

I was extremely elated to read, therefore, that over 300 Holocaust survivors from around the world have signed a petition AGAINST Israel, saying:

“We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia….“Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!”

Not surprisingly, this letter is not receiving as much coverage as it deserves.

Lastly, Muslims, realize that ‘Jews’ are NOT your enemy – Zionism is.

These are Jewish survivors criticizing Israel, and their voice is the most effective imaginable in such criticism.

Yasir Qadhi's photo.
Yasir Qadhi's photo.

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