Notes and news, insights and inspiration from the autonomous collective mind of GS.

My favorite source for online news, Mashable, surprised me with an article this morning indicating that the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary includes some unusual new additions (a.k.a. edition additions). Among them are favored interweb acronyms and symbols like OMG, <3, and LOL. They join the ranks of TMI, BFF, and IMHO which were apparently added in earlier updates.

Now I'm not trying to hate on the folks at Oxford, where they call themselves, 'the definitive record of the English language', but it seems to me that popular symbols and acronyms, while appropriate for a lexicon with a broader focus than a dictionary, are not suitable here. After all, Oxford itself says,  "The Oxford English Dictionary ... is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world." Please note the operative word - words. Now, I am aware that dictionaries contain other wackronyms (That means words that are actually acronyms - but don't go looking in the dictionary for it, cause you won't find it - at least not this year.) like scuba and awol, but those words have longed been used to represent ideas as opposed to acronyms. The same may happen with LOL over time, but the current induction seems a bit premature. Why OMG but not MILF? Where do we stop and when is it appropriate to say that acronyms have become more than the sum of their parts?

Maybe I'm splitting hairs. Maybe I need my morning coffee in order to read news in a less biased fashion, but at this point, the practice of adding acronyms like OMG to a dictionary kinda makes me say WTF. How about you?