Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Next year's new words

Merriam-Webster announced yesterday that they've added over 100 words to the their New Collegiate Dictionary.

Among the new words: edamame, fanboy, netroots, dwarf planet.

I think, however, that they're still perhaps missing a few.

The other night I was playing Boggle with friends, and the word "stim" made its way onto my list. Here's how it's defined in the Double-Tongued Dictionary:

stim v. to self-stimulate; (specifically) among autistic people, to fixate on a comforting or compelling thing or action (such as rocking or humming); to perseverate. Also n., a (self-)stimulating thing or behavior.

Joy's got a lot of stimming going on this summer. When let loose on a lawn, she immediately falls to pulling out clumps of grass and running it between her fingers. At the park, the gravel or the chunks of old tires are much more interesting than the play equipment.

But stim isn't in the mainstream dictionaries yet. So I couldn't claim a point for it, even though another player with connections to the autism community backed me up on the definition.

Wonder what year it'll be before the list of new words added will include stim? Or perhaps neurodiversity?

Meanwhile, on the next round, the player who knew "stim" and I both came up with the word "celiac." And cancelled one another out, because you only get to count points for words that nobody else finds!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Maybe next year they'll add "Elvis sightings???" ;-)