I [heart] the OED

But this time, for some reason, the new words set off a stormlet of annoyance among columnists and bloggers, some of them with strange ideas of the OED’s mission. “Think of the Oxford Dictionary and you think of a rock-ribbed, tradition-hugging defender of the King’s English,” huffed a columnist in the Pasadena Star-News. A blogger at The Washington Post had the same impression: “The Oxford English Dictionary…is supposed to have dignity,” she wrote. “It is supposed to enshrine the words that actually mean things. Just because people are using these words doesn’t mean that they deserve to be in the dictionary.”

These folks have not been paying attention. The OED has never been a “defender of the King’s (or Queen’s, or anyone’s) English.” Since its launch in the 1880s, its aim has been to record the histories and meanings of English words, whether slangy or elegant, dialectal or archaic, refined or rude. At the OED’s website, editor John Simpson explains that the dictionary neither endorses nor bans words, and thus naturally includes “many slang, informal, technical, and other words which [some] people might not consider to be ‘proper.’ ”

But the “OMG, OED!” meme proved an irresistible opportunity for the crankier sort of commenters, who declared that the OED “should be ashamed of itself,” that it was contributing to “the bastardization of the written language,” that it would “drive English teachers across the nation to despair.” Never mind that OMG first appeared in 1917 (in a private letter) and that LOL appeared as early as 1960 (at the time, short for “little old lady”); their use is “ghastly” and “unpardonable.”

The dissenters’ horror was compounded by a widely repeated mistake about another update, the dictionary’s new entry for “heart.” It is not true that the heart symbol has been added to the OED; it’s the verbal translation of that symbol — the verb heart meaning “love,” as in “I [heart] Huckabees” — that was added to the existing definitions of heart. This may indeed be “the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper-stickers,” as OED editor Katherine Connor Martin writes, but otherwise it’s no big deal; heart has been a verb for about 1,100 years.