Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Words: What Our Books Hinge Upon


"Words Roxanne I was Afraid of Words" This is a line from funny Steven Martin movie "Roxanne."
Recently I ran into an article on Mental Floss.com titled 35 Modern Words Added to the Dictionary. The article talks about new blended or coined phrases or words we have in the English language. Check-out the article.

1. Bling
2. Bromance
3. Chillax
4. Crunk
5. D'oh
6. Droolworthy*
7. Frankenfood
8. Grrrl
9. Guyliner
10. Hater
11. Illiterati
12. Infomania 
13. Jeggings 
14. La-la Land
15. Locavore 
16. Mankini
17. Mini-Me 
18. Muffin Top
19. Muggle
20. Noob
21. Obvs
22. OMG
23. Po-po
24. Purple State
25. Screenager
26. Sexting
27. Textspeak
28. Totes 
29. Truthiness
30. Twitterati
31. Unfriend
32. Upcycle
33. Whatevs
34. Whovian
35. Woot

Do you know all the words? Definitions are in the article if not. I know I didn't know all of them. Some of them I could figure out the meeting, but had never heard the saying. I am not sure I would say the word Droolworthy to anyone but my dog.

I certainly will not being adding Crunk to any book anytime soon. That is unless I have a very unintelligent teenage boy as a character.

As a writer, I love learning new words. I do the elementary school thing by trying to look at the context of the word being used to figure out its meaning. I LOVE that on my Kindle I can move the cursor over the word and it shows me the definition. I collect words, I use new ones three times to solidify them as mine, and love hearing people say some new words then look them up when they leave the room. It is always fun when I find out they used it incorrectly.

FYI my spellcheck only recognized 7 out of 35 of these words.

Where do you get your new words?
Will you use any of these 35 newly added to the dictionary words in any of your books?
Have you made up words in your book?




1 comment:

  1. Wow that's an impressive list of words I don't think I will ever use in writing lol! I love new words too but not sure I can honestly say I feel that way about any of them! Found you through WLC and can't wait to hear more from you! I also love exclamation marks...

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