Date:10/06/2005 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2005/06/10/stories/2005061000712000.htm

International - Briefly

A gaggle of new entries

By David Ward

A whole collection of interesting new words in a dictionary Collins has jumped on the respect bandwagon and made a bit of a fuss about the aggression and filth creeping into English

LONDON: Someone, somewhere must talk about diquarks and cackleberries. Why else would Collins have included them in the new edition of its English dictionary?

But who do you know who could define the first as low-energy configurations of two quarks attracted to one another by virtue of having antisymmetric colours and spins? Or the second as an egg?

And what sort of person says he going to treat himself to a four-minute, free-range cackleberry? It may be slang, but why waste soldier-dipping time by using four syllables when there is an ancient word that does the job in one?

Some examples

That is the trouble with collections of new words: pedants scorn those they have never heard of and snort when they find that gems of their own vocabulary have only just made it into print.

Take scrote (``a worthless fellow'': this has been around for years; as has Band-Aid baby — ``a child conceived to strengthen a faltering relationship.'')

And what of scunnered (``annoyed, discontented, or bored. Nauseated or disgusted'') — the Oxford English Dictionary records that the poet William Dunbar used it in the early 16th century. Why has it taken Collins 500 years to catch up?

Up-to-the-minute

Elsewhere they are up-to-the-minute. Bird flu is in before a single case has been diagnosed here and hobbit is defined in its new anthropological meaning: ``a nickname coined for a very small type of primitive human, Homo floresiensis, following the discovery of remains of eight such people on the island of Flores, Indonesia, in 2004''.

Collins has jumped on the respect bandwagon and made a bit of a fuss about the aggression and filth creeping into English.

``The variety of names for urban tribes is a sign of the fear people seem to have for them,'' says Jeremy Butterfield, the dictionary's editor-in-chief. ``The obscene and violent words in this edition provide a sinister picture of something that is becoming more and more a part of everyday life.'' As for other areas dealt with, a green-light district is ``an area in which prostitution is officially tolerated.''

Possibly the best word in the list is vuvuzela, South African in origin and meaning ``an elongated plastic instrument that football fans blow to make a loud noise similar to the trumpeting of an elephant.''

Not common outside South Africa yet. But it has appeared in this newspaper. In the paragraph above.