SHOULD DICTIONARIES BE HEP?

NITSUH ABEBE REPORTS “SORRY, WEBSTER. MOST PEOPLE DON’T WANT INTERNET SLANG IN THE DICTIONARY,” The New York Times, September 18, 2026. Or so claims a news release he received last month: It “surveyed 1,524 Americans on this question and found 61 percent saying no: They did not want to see ‘6-7’ or ‘skibidi’ in the nearest Merriam-Webster. The youngest respondents were most opposed, followed by the oldest. Those between 25 and 54—years often spent pretending you still follow everything younger people are saying—were only slightly warmer.”

Here are tidbits gleaned from this article, together with my own opinionated view, being as I am a hep English speaker, sorta.

Dictionaries: Gatekeepers or Documentarians? Abebe describes, “Preply blames this antipathy on a misunderstanding of what dictionaries are for. ‘People often think that when a word enters the dictionary, it has received some kind of official approval,’ says Madeline Enos, one of Preply’s language experts. ‘But that isn’t the role dictionaries play. Modern dictionaries record how people actually use language.’ That’s certainly how the people who build today’s dictionaries tend to see themselves—as neutral documentarians, not ‘gatekeepers of “official” English,’ as Enos puts it.”

Or Just Marketing?  “You might also blame marketing: Corny slang makes news,” Abebe says. “I doubt you heard about the Oxford English Dictionary’s adding ‘nihonium’ or ‘lutefisk’ this summer—but you may have heard that its 2025 Word of the Year was ‘rage bait,’ which inherited the title from ‘brain rot,’ ‘rizz’ and ‘goblin mode.’ ”

Just for the record, I’ve long known of lutefisk from Daughter Suz’s warnings as she attends Sons of Norway suppers each year. I can guess that nihonium has something to do with Japan (Nh is element 113, discovered there in 2004, recognized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry in 2016). Rage bait and brain rot are not unfamiliar to me. Rizz and goblin mode? I confess to being occasionally unhep. 

Merriam-Webster Newbies. Abebe cites, “Last fall, Merriam-Webster announced a new print edition of its Collegiate Dictionary with more than 5,000 fresh entries; the ones singled out, in both promotional materials and the news stories that followed, were things like ‘dad bod’ and ‘adulting.’ ” 

Readers of SimanaitisSays may recall related news from “Merriam-Webster New Entries,” August 25, 2025; and “Merriam-Webster Time Traveler,” August 14, 2026. I had good fun with words originally cited in 1942, among them “gunzel,” “86,” and “A-Hole.”

Gee, why do these three stick in my mind?

Back to Abebe: By the way, I researched Mr. Abebe, music critic, journalist, and biographer who has an extensive collection of articles appearing in The New York Times. AllMusic cites, “Nitsuh Abebe is a senior at Northwestern University, studying English and creative writing. He looks forward to long periods of marginal employment and frustrating attempts at writing a novel or collection of poems.”

His choice of “marginal employment” reminds me of my own oft-repeated comment about managing “to get this far in life without ever having a real job.”

Thinking of Future Historians. Abebe predicts, “Future historians will need to know what ‘skibidi’ was, lest they mistake it for a protest movement or an obscure slur; they will need to decode countless dumb jokes and political dog whistles to make sense of old Elon Musk tweets for their magisterial studies of the feudal system on Mars. Social media from less than a decade ago already presents interpretive challenges, even for the terminally online.”

I like the pun.

When Slang Is Not Really Slang. Abebe observes, “Preply’s roundup of this year’s top slang includes ‘the saxophones are getting louder,’ a straightforward, full-sentence reference to an ominous musical cue from the film Boyz N the Hood—is that really slang?”

Yet We Need Authoritative New Reference Formats: Abebe proposes, “Shouldn’t we have authoritative new reference formats purpose-built for the malleable, allusive way people communicate? Academic publishers produce slang dictionaries, L.S.P. dictionaries (‘language for specific purposes,’ like medical dictionaries), etymological dictionaries, encyclopedias—couldn’t some new thing join them, some Oxford Social Reference or Collins Meme Almanac, for the sake of those poor future historians?”

“Dictionaries could still do their part,” Abebe concludes, “Teenagers could still cringe at seeing inane generational in-jokes dissected by lexicographers. But at least nobody would ever need American Heritage to define full sentences about saxophones.”

Or my being occasionally unhep. Or is it “inhep?” ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026