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'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

11 points

by austinallegro

2 hours ago

| past

| 4 comments

| news.sky.com

| HN

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xdfgh1112

1 hour ago

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Weird. Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reeks of capitalising on the zeitgeist for PR

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TillE

1 hour ago

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I've definitely heard "delulu" years ago, probably floating around Twitter. There's a Wikipedia article on the word for some reason, and it supports this.

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dragonwriter

1 hour ago

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> Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reels of capitalising the zeitgeist for PR

Delulu is more than a decade old.

> it's a physical dictionary after all

Is the Cambridge Dictionary still physical-first? I know the OED has been digital-first since at least around the turn of the millenium (the last full physical edition was in 1989.)

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morjom

1 hour ago

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Don't "regular" dictionaries like the Cambridge and Oxford ones usually avoid adding slang?

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dragonwriter

1 hour ago

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The OED may take a while to add words sometimes, but it doesn't avoid slang; it aims for completeness rather than limiting itself to a particular formal register.

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cjs_ac

1 hour ago

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The second paragraph of the article:

> Delulu, tradwife, broligarcy, and lewk, have all been added because experts believe the words will not be just a fad, but will have linguistic staying power.

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lucideer

1 hour ago

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The fact they've included that paragraph doesn't invalidate the question. Cambridge used to add ~500, maybe as many as 1000 words annually. In recent years it's climbed to 2000 but 6000 is rather unprecedented.

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TillE

1 hour ago

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I think despite having lived through it, it's easy to miss just how transformative smartphones and social media have been to human society.

There's been an absolute explosion in communication. In the early years of the internet it was pretty exciting and novel to be able to talk to people from other countries. Now it's completely unremarkable.

All this of course has a huge effect on how language develops and is used, and really we're still in the early years of it all (I guess The Smartphone Era starts around 2010 or so).

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serf

40 minutes ago

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counterpoint:

i've been on my phone/social/media/etc through the entire trend and this is the only time i've ever read the word 'delulu'; I had to look it up.

Might I suggest that tribe matters a lot in this context?

I don't listen to k-pop, I don't watch machinima, and I only knew 'tradwife' from the bullshit politics associated with the concept..

I think Cambridge called these too early. Maybe i'm old, and maybe i'm sheltered, but I never hear these words used in real life aside from a young nephew who was into the toilet thing, and he didn't so much use the word as just scream SKIBIDI while dancing around the room.

I'm fine with being old. Some trends you prefer to see sail away from you.

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DaSHacka

54 minutes ago

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The absolute state

Hoe embarrassing

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pringk02

38 minutes ago

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There is an article of this kind every year where we all get a chance to be up in arms about the fact that language and culture is ever-shifting and changing and not something static.

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StopDisinfo910

10 minutes ago

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The comments here really remind of the usual debate around Wikipedia.

Some people really want to see these tools as guardian and judge determining what should be worthy of inclusion rather than tools describing a reality external to them.

Maybe old age really is a shipwreck after all.