David CookThe folks at Merriam-Webster Collegiate have just updated their dictionary, announcing Monday the addition of 150 new words.
There’s a hipster, tech-world aura to the list of new words. Give them skin and bones, and these words would move to Portland, or maybe Tribeca. At random, I chose six words off the list, and cobbled them together in a sentence. See how skinny jeans this is.
At the hotspot, the freegan with the baby bump unfriended that catfish tweep.
Selfie made the list. So did fracking. And crowdfunding and hashtag, both of which seem blocky and compoundish, like two words parallel parking into one another.
The most poetic of the new words is steampunk, which just does so much with nine letters, sending you either toward a Spielbergian daydream, or immediately bringing back olfactory memories of that locker room smell from high school.