A headbanger asks for a phat longneck and Frankenfood and leaves a couple of dead presidents on the bar.
Yes, it’s English, and the translation runs: A hard-rock musician asks for an excellent bottle of beer and some genetically altered food and pays with paper currency.
Of course, it will all be perfectly clear to readers of the new edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary that hits bookstores today with 10,000 new words and 100,000 new meanings and revisions throughout its 225,000 definitions.
Pop culture remains a valuable source of the new words in the dictionary and give us terms like “McJob” (low-paying, dead-end work) and phrases like “dead-cat bounce” (Wall Street’s term for a brief and insignificant recovery in a stock, which comes from the facetious notion that even a dead cat will bounce if it’s dropped from a significant height.)
“Probably electronic communications technology is still the biggest source of a new vocabulary,” said John Morse, president and publisher of Merriam-Webster. “The Web has been very significant in spawning new words.
SAY WHAT?
Here are some of the new words in the dictionary:
Dot-commer – A person who owns or works for a dot-com.
NIMBY – opposition to locating something undesirable in one’s neighborhood Brewski – beer
Def – highly attractive or gratifying, excellent
Agita – feeling of agitation or anxiety
McJob – low paying job
Psyops – military operations aimed at influencing the enemy state of mind
Brewski – beer