680News - Lisa Brandt

Ginormous is now a legitimate word. I’ve always used it as a bit of a jokey way of combining gigantic and enormous but now the two are married forever in the new Mirriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. It’s one of 100 new entries into this year’s edition.

Also added: Bollywood, sudoku, speed dating, DVR (digital video recorder), IED (improvised explosive device) and smackdowns.

Serious wordsmiths are taking issue with some of the additions, claiming they won’t have staying power in our vocabulary. They’re like the pet rocks of the word world. But the dictionary’s President says they’ve traced “ginormous” back to 1948 military slang. He also says it has appeared in many newspaper and magazine articles written by professional writers and that’s something they watch for before declaring a suspected word a real word.

I wonder, though, if you have to explain a word to the average person, how it rates entry into the book. Among the entries: microgreen, defined as a shoot of a standard salad plant. You can grow a salad plant? Gray literature is written material that’s hard to obtain. And crunk is a style of Southern rap music. They certainly seem like fringe words to me and would definitely require clarification in a conversation with most people I know. Let’s put it this way; don’t expect to hear 680’s Music Reporter Rudy Blair with a weekly crunk report.

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