It is amazing how the year has passed and unusual and somewhat bizarre events happen. One of these rare events was the denomination of “selfie” as the word of the year and the addition of other uncommon words. The impetus for the addition of this atypical and informal word is the heavy use of it in this past 2013. The definition of “selfie” in the Oxford Dictionary is “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”. It is curious because some other words such as “emoji” that became famous thanks to technology and social media. Other words (yet vulgar) such as “twerking” also made it to this list of newly added words, even though latter made it thanks to a reference to a “pop culture” dance introduced earlier this year. Also, we can find strong and words we may not really know about because we barely heard them! these were “michelada” and “fauxhawk”. These words are a little weird as I said before… Micheladas are drinks with beer, tomato juice and lime juice while a fauxhawk is a hairstyle similar to a mohawk. Thanks to Facebook, as we know, it had a boom from long time ago, produced the word “unlike”: No, this is not the same as “dislike”. There were many words produced by pop culture introduced “mandatorily” in the dictionary. We are excited to see what the new words are going to be in the future and which will make it to Oxford in 2014!
By: Rafael Castro
By: Rafael Castro