For Oxford dictionary, hip is watchword

The world’s most monumental dictionary has gotten very hip indeed.

The new 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary published yesterday offers a nimble dash through the trite and traumatic, the grim and the gracious — offering right proper definitions for terms yanked from the news media, cyberspace, Hollywood, science, warfare and even the beauty parlor.

The 22,000-page, 500,000-word “OED” features an update on the noun “Brazilian,” which has little to do with Brazil, but a great deal to do with strategic hair removal and new styles in feminine undergarments.

“Brazilian” is just one of 3,000 new entries. There’s also “blonde moment” and “bootylicious,” “da bomb” and “daisy cutter,” which is a real bomb, a bunker-busting weapon that fell into the vernacular during the war in Afghanistan.

Harry Potter fans will recognize “muggle,” or someone lacking in a specific skill. “Saddlebags” are now found on women’s hips rather than horses. “WMD” and “24/7” have also been deemed worthy of inclusion.

“Our language is transforming,” publishing manager Judy Pearsall said. “We closely monitor the changes that are taking place.”

And monitor they do: comic books, movie scripts, news reports, menus, novels, Web jargon, and research papers are not immune from the roving eyes of OED wordsmiths.

Don’t forget “bada bing,” which the OED classifies as an exclamation, also found in the form “bada bing bada boom.” It’s something that “will happen effortlessly and predictably,” the definition explains; the origin is “probably imitating the sound of a drumroll.”

And yes, the OED does credit HBO’s “The Sopranos” for popularizing the phrase, which appears without a hyphen. But the OED makes it official: the hyphen isn’t what it used to be.

“Overall, the hyphen is now used only half as much as it was in 1993,” the OED explains, noting that “e-mails” is now “emails.” It does allow “lose-lose,” “ob-gyn,” “bake-off” and “T-bone,” however.

This trend is bothering some British observers who take issue with a hyphen-free zone, claiming it is a result of further Americanization of proper English. Things are just getting too casual or commercialized, noted editorials in the Times of London and other papers.

“Demands from the modern design and advertising industries for uncluttered logos could be helping to kill the English hyphen and murder the apostrophe,” the Guardian complained yesterday.

Indeed, the polite little possessive mark may be on its way out.

“The apostrophe is disappearing from where you would expect it,” the OED states, citing “lets go” as an acceptable form.

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