In case you haven't heard the term enough this week after the onslaught of Miley-Cyrus-VMA-performance news, Oxford Dictionaries Online announced today that "twerk," among other new words, would be added to its latest edition.
A representative from the company says that the former Disney star was not the cause of "twerk" being added to the site, MTVnews.com reported.
Head of U.S. Dictionaries, Kathrine Connor Martin, told MTV news that the decision to add twerk and other words was made back in the spring. Among the new terms are "buzzworthy" and "selfie."
Martin explained: "Frequency [of use] is very important, but we look at a variety of different sources. We have 'corpora' - so those are sets of electronic text that are supposed to be representative of the English language, so we can see changes happening and identify new words that are coming into use that way."
Oxford Dictionaries Online, not to be confused with the historical-leaning Oxford English Dictionary, defines twerk as: "verb, dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance."
Martin told MTV News that the origin of the word is English, coming from the Bounce music scene in New Orleans during the 1990s.
What do you think of this news? Is it about time it was made official, or is it a betrayal of the English language?
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