“Don’t say ain’t ’cause ain’t ain’t in the dictionary.”

My freshmen were always proud of themselves for coming up with that chestnut after a classroom discussion of the value of Standard English. They were disconcerted when I responded that, in fact, ain’t is in the dictionary — leading them to grab a nearby Merriam-Webster’s and check it out. I would add, “So are all the cuss words, and I don’t want you using those in class, either.” Once they found ain’t, they’d look up the expletive of their choice, and, grinning, move on. It’s possibly the only time they looked up a word in the dictionary of their own free will.

We no longer trust the authority of politicians, priests, or corporate executives as perhaps we once did in some nostalgic past. But the authority of the dictionary remains, so when Merriam-Webster announces that it’s adding 100 new words to its newest Collegiate edition, people take notice.

These aren’t necessarily new words — some date back more than a century — but they weren’t mainstream until recently. “As soon as we see the word used without explanation or translation or gloss, we consider it a naturalized citizen of the English language,” said Peter Sokolowski, an editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster. “If somebody is using it to convey a specific idea and that idea is successfully conveyed in that word, it’s ready to go in the dictionary.”

Which of these are already part of your lexicon?

• norovirus
  Small, round single-stranded RNA viruses, such as the Norwalk Virus. First noted in 2002, this is among the newest of the new words.
• malware
  Like a computer virus (but different), malware is software that messes with your computer.
• air quotes
  Gesturing with your hands to indicate quotation marks.
• mental health day
  You’re not ill, but you’re calling in sick in hopes that a day off will lift your spirits.
• webinar
  A seminar held online.
• wingnut
  Considered slang, it describes an advocate of extreme change.
• subprime
  The 2007 Word of the Year on somebody’s list (not Merriam-Webster’s), it refers to the practice of lending money to people who don’t really qualify for the loan and then charging them a higher interest rate.
• dwarf planet
  A celestial body that orbits the sun and has a spherical shape but is too small to disturb other objects from its orbit. (See Pluto.)
• pescatarian
  A vegetarian who also eats fish.
• mondegreen
  First noted in 1954, words mistaken for other words. A mondegreen most often comes from misunderstood phrases or lyrics.

Did you go somewhere over the long weekend, or did you save money and stay home? A recent CNN poll suggests that gas prices affected the travel plans of as many as 44% of Americans over the Memorial Day weekend. (CNN is careful to say that the poll is not scientific.)

More people may opt for “staycations” this year, an experience the Urban Dictionary defines as a vacation “spent at one’s home enjoying all that home and one’s home environs have to offer.” This neologism already has 44,500 hits on Google (though quite a few appear to be copies of the same AP stories), with tips on how to plan a successful one and at least one blog claiming the name. One site claims the word dates back to at least 2006, but it appears to have catapulted to possible Word of the Year status with this spring’s ongoing gas price hikes and the approaching summer.

Other summer neologisms include momcation and, my favorite, voluntourist.

Have you heard any other new words that bespeak our times — other nominees for Word of the Year?

The message in my inbox was succinct: “Spellingcity.com. It’s new. It’s cool.”

And it is. Spelling City offers kids up to about 8th grade a variety of ways to interact with words: they can hear them, drag and drop letters to spell them, and play games like Hangman as practice. Teachers can type in their own spelling lists and save them so that class time isn’t spent on random words.

I tried typing in some SAT-level words, and Spelling City objected. The site is still being developed, so down the road it may be ready for words like mendacity. In the meantime, it’s open for business. If you teach traditional spelling units, this site could be your new best friend!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day — the day celebrating a patron saint of Ireland, a man who escaped slavery and later returned as a missionary to the people who had enslaved him.

In honor of the day when “all the world is Irish,” I thought it would be fun to explore Irish influence on English vocabulary. We all know a few words like shillelagh, shamrock, and blarney that we use mostly on March 17. What words do we use year-round?

Turns out there’s a slew of them, words galore. You don’t have to be a bard from a bog to use Irish words. You could be a callow slob, a cute colleen, or a scallywag running a phony scam. We speak Irish when we say someone was wailing like a banshee, something was broken to smithereens, or when we have a sip of the water of life.

Y’all enjoy the day! And — trust me on this — stay away from the green beer.

In 2006, it was to pluto. In 2005, truthiness. And last Friday the American Dialect Society announced its 2007 Word of the Year: subprime.

In making the announcement, Professor Wayne Glowka, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, observed, “When you have investment companies losing billions of dollars over something like bundled subprime loans, then you have to consider whether it’s important.” He added, “You probably also want to think about paying off that third mortgage.”

The Society consists of “linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, authors, editors, professors, university students, and independent scholars” (that last one must include English teachers). Bring them to Chicago for a convention, and they’ll start talking about words: they can’t help themselves.

Subprime won overall, but, like the Oscars, there are multiple categories and winners:

• Most Useful (also named Most Likely to Succeed): the prefix green- to “designate environmental concern”
• Most Creative: Googlegänger, “person with your name who shows up when you google yourself”
• Most Unnecessary: Happy Kwanhanamas! [Kwanza + Hanukka + Christmas]
• Most Outrageous: toe-tapper, a homosexual (think: Senator Larry Craig)
• Least Likely to Succeed: strand-in, a “protest duplicating being stranded inside an airplane on a delayed flight.”

Read the entire press release.

I like the way they pass the honor around among the parts of speech. Two years ago, it was a noun. Last year it was a verb, and this year it’s an adjective. In 1992, even an interjection (Not!) was Word of the Year. We’ll know we have true linguistic equity when a conjunction wins the honor. Coordinating, subordinating, correlative … I’m not picky.

perfect storm organic authored back in the day sweet random under the bus What do these words and phrases have in common? They’re banned.

Specifically they have made the 33rd annual list of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness established by a committee at Lake Superior State University, announced Dec. 31.

“Over the years,” according to this year’s announcement, “some copycat lists have made an appearance, but LSSU’s list was first.”

The list solicits nominations and rationales via the LSSU website. Among the comments received —

Perfect storm — “Hands off book titles as cheap descriptors!”
Organic — Another advertising gimmick to make things sound better than they really are, according to Rick DeVan of Willoughby, Ohio, who said he has heard claims such as “My business is organic,” and computers having “organic software.”
Authored — “In one of former TV commentator Edwin Newman’s books, he wonders if it would be correct to say that someone ‘paintered’ a picture?” — Dorothy Betzweiser, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Read about the 16 other banished words and phrases at the site.

These were good choices. What do you suppose we could nominate for next year’s list?

Merriam-Webster and the Scripps National Spelling Bee have teamed to create a resource that’s valuable not just to spellers but to everyone who thinks etymology is fun: Spell It!

The site has organized its 700 words by country of origin, hoping that knowing something about a word’s history will help a student remember how to spell it. Click on a symbol at the end of selected words to pick up a spelling tip based on the language of origin.

Can you match the word to its language of origin without peeking at a dictionary? Answers below.

.
.
.
.
.
.
Answers
1. D
2. J
3. A
4. F
5. G
6. J
7. B
8. C
9. E
10. I

Launched October 7, 2007, FreeRice.com presents the user with a vocabulary word and asks him/her to select the definition from a list. Get it right, and it moves the user to a more challenging level. Get it wrong, and it moves the user to an easier level. For each correct answer, the site donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food program.

There are 50 levels, and I will confess I reached a point at which I was tempted to open a second browser window and start looking words up. I decided that would be cheating. If my students did that, though, I would call it “learning;” and I don’t think hungry people in Third World nations would mind.

Can you say “sponge activity”? Yes, I thought you could.

“Why do we have to practice spelling?” the young man asked in all sincerity as he struggled to get assiduous correctly on paper. “We have spellcheckers to take of that for us now. Nobody needs to know how to spell any more.”

It was time for a lesson in the Cupertino Effect.

For all their appearance of magic, spellcheckers are just software running algorithms. Type in “I need a loaf of braed,” and the famous red underline appears, prompting some attention. But if you forget to space inthe middle of in the, some spellcheckers make the correction automatically. Similarly, students who type in the pronoun I without capitalizing it often find that the spellchecker capitalizes for them. When they work well, spellcheckers are a wonderful convenience for people who occasionally mistype something.

When spellcheckers were new, however, some fine-tuning was still needed. The most famous glitch involved the word co-operation. For the typist who remembered the hyphen, all was well. The typist who adopted the newer style and omitted the hyphen was faced with a red underline: the spellchecker didn’t recognize cooperation. If, in haste or uncertainty, the typist accepted whatever the spellchecker recommended as a correction, cooperation became Cupertino, the town in northern California that is home to Apple Computers. This led to some red faces, especially in Europe, where a German NATO officer was reported saying, “The Cupertino with our Italian comrades proved to be very fruitful.” A proposal from the European Union’s Scientific and Technical Research Committee called for “stimulating cross-border Cupertino.”

Spellcheckers are better now, but the responsibility to learn to spell remains.

Ben Zimmer’s blog on the Cupertino Effect has more examples, as does The Language Log.