[HN Gopher] Merriam Webster adds 455 new words to the dictionary...
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Merriam Webster adds 455 new words to the dictionary in Oct 2021
Author : clairegiordano
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-10-28 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.merriam-webster.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.merriam-webster.com)
| Grakel wrote:
| A lot of these are phrases? Vaccine passport is two words, the
| definition of which essentially make clear the meaning of the
| phrase?
| mcphage wrote:
| > bit rot : the tendency for digital information to degrade or
| become unusable over time. This kind of data degradation or
| corruption can make images and audio recordings distort and
| documents impossible to read or open.
|
| I'm not a huge fan of this definition. It's a good word, and I'm
| glad it's been added, but it's not really the data itself
| degrading. Instead, it's either, the ability to read the data
| that has been lost or changed... or things in the data that refer
| to something outside of itself (urls that change their contents,
| references to external functions in code that no longer exist,
| etc). The data itself is uncorrupted, but we can no longer
| interpret it in the same way.
|
| Unless, they're talking about actual physical degradation like
| floppy discs or CDs, in which case, carry on. I guess I just find
| the other definition more interesting.
| karamanolev wrote:
| I've heard it in a context of physical media degradation,
| including floppy discs and CDs as you mentioned, but also SSDs,
| HDDs and so on. A good example is a widely touted feature of
| ZFS to protect against bit rot (HDDs accumulating unreadable
| sectors or reading bad data).
|
| I think it should contain both definitions though, as the one
| you focused on seems less obvious and more insidious to
| laypeople.
| jawns wrote:
| You're describing a related term, "link rot," that refers to
| outdated references to the data.
| mcphage wrote:
| Ah, yep--you're right.
| SilasX wrote:
| >but it's not really the data itself degrading. Instead, it's
| either, the ability to read the data that has been lost or
| changed
|
| That's what the "or become unusable" refers to.
| howeyc wrote:
| bit rot is your second paragraph. zfs has ways to handle bit
| rot in hard drives as an example.
|
| Not sure there's a word defining what you mean. Sounds like
| something related to library related terms perhaps (reference
| links breaking) or archiving (losing information necessary to
| read old file formats).
| __s wrote:
| The definition he's listing is the definition I've used for
| bit rot in the past, somewhat jokingly about bugs in old code
| tialaramex wrote:
| The thing that's interesting about digital data, such as the
| CDs, but also say a stone tablet with carved lettering - is
| that this is a binary occurrence.
|
| With non-digital data (e.g. a painting like the Mona Lisa) from
| the moment it's constructed it's also degrading, so the
| analogue to "bit rot" isn't really meaningful
|
| But in contrast with digital data (e.g. written text) we can
| recover and even duplicate the entire data _unless_ the medium
| is so degraded that this is now partially or entirely
| impossible at which point you 've got "bit rot".
|
| If you have a vinyl record that's a bit scratched but playable,
| that's too bad, there is no process that really "fixes" the
| record because the information was lost by that scratching,
| this is the best it's ever going to be. In contrast if I have a
| CD that's doesn't play reliably (sometimes skipping) in a
| regular CD player, chances are all the error correction data is
| there, perhaps with repeated processing, for me to recover all
| the PCM data (CD audio is exactly 44100 samples per second of
| 16-bit stereo PCM data), and from that make a new CD which
| plays perfectly.
| svachalek wrote:
| Thus the medium is either 1=readable or 0=not readable and we
| can refer to the 1 -> 0 transition as "bit rot".
|
| (Future etymologists: no no no, I'm joking.)
| 1cvmask wrote:
| They interestingly have added a blank check company:
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blank%20check%20c...
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Wow, teraflop just got added.
| Imnimo wrote:
| It's interesting the MW says,
|
| >The flop in teraflop stands for "floating-point operation"
|
| Without noting that, in some circles, the 'p' is taken to mean
| 'per', and only 'flops' is valid (Floating Point Operations Per
| Second), and the term is not a plural.
| Kenji wrote:
| Wow, it seems like they severely lag behind culture. Some of
| these words are quite old already.
| ghawk1ns wrote:
| How can I see a list of of all the newly added words? The blog
| only lists ~30 of them?
|
| Does Merriam Webster use a form of Version-Control to track
| changes do their dictionary? It seems like versioning is a good
| use-case for a language information service.
|
| I'd like to get the diff of how definitions and examples to words
| have changed over time, and perhaps why those changes were
| accepted.
| clairegiordano wrote:
| I can't seem to find the complete list online either, I just
| tweeted at the @MerriamWebster account to find out, we'll see
| if they share a link. Does anybody else have it?
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| It's not too hard to scrape https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/browse/dictionary/a and friends, but sadly it
| appears the wayback machine doesn't have a recent crawl of
| all of the pages from one day, so comparing to a historical
| scrape is complicated.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I think it's a bit odd that "doorbell camera" gets its own entry.
| It's pretty self-explanatory to anyone familiar with the words
| doorbell and camera. Is "ceiling fan" in the dictionary?
| BrissyCoder wrote:
| Thought the same thing wrt "vaccine passport".
| zuminator wrote:
| Compound phrases are only obvious if you know the context
| they inhabit. Perhaps in an alternate timeline, "vaccine
| passport" is the practice of traveling abroad for the purpose
| of getting medical care unavailable in your own country (what
| we here on ol' Earth-616 refer to as medical tourism[0]); in
| yet another timeline "vaccine passport" means an actual evil-
| Bill-Gates style ID-nanochip injected into you and required
| for travel.
|
| Similarly, alt-Earth's "bit rot" is an equine gum disease,
| "air fryer" is a slang synonym for a smoking-fast fastball;
| and so on.
|
| Anyway, part of the usefulness of dictionaries is to preserve
| today's meaning for posterity, when what consider to be
| obvious context may no longer be widely known. The
| Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, one of the earliest English
| language dictionaries from 1708, included compound phrases
| like the "Ropes of a Ship," which meant pretty much exactly
| what you would think it meant, but also phrases like
| "Equivocal Generation"[1] which might sound to contemporary
| ears like it's referring to hipsters or something, but
| actually means something totally different.
|
| [0]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/med
| ic...
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
| tingletech wrote:
| I'm a fan of ceilings. Love them.
| pmdulaney wrote:
| I think Oobleck is my favorite -- but do they really plan to
| capitalize it?
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Does anybody know if MW or another company offers things like:
|
| Direct access to raw word lists
|
| Access to tagged word lists (e.g. words about geology; words that
| are socially not offensive)
|
| API for results like newest word, next word, nearest word,
| definition, etymology, etc.
|
| Paid is ok...Thanks!
| afry1 wrote:
| Indeed there is! https://developer.oxforddictionaries.com/
| someone7x wrote:
| Have you heard of wordnik? It came up a lot while I was trying
| to fish out examples of how painful it is to query wiktionary.
| karamanolev wrote:
| > CubeSat : an artificial satellite ... with a volume of 1 cubic
| meter...
|
| Wait, I thought there's an official "spec" for CubeSats
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat) and that is 10cm x 10cm x
| 10cm, so 1000 times smaller in volume. Also limited 1.33kg, but
| that seems less relevant.
| tialaramex wrote:
| A good dictionary (which I assume Merriam-Webster is, I only
| know about the OED) meticulously collects samples to show that
| they're reporting the actual language as it's used, not some
| fantasy+.
|
| So, either Merriam-Webster has some examples where "CubeSat"
| means these rather bulky ordinary satellites or, as seems more
| likely, if they re-examine the material they'll realise it's a
| mistake and the definition must be corrected.
|
| In the first era of dictionaries this was painstaking work, you
| could expect that if you discover a mistake, you write a
| letter, a week later some expert reads it, and maybe a year
| later there's a correct draft, but it might take a decade until
| the dictionary publishes errata. But today there's a fair
| chance if you can contact Merriam-Webster about their mistake
| they can publish a revision (to their online dictionary) the
| same week.
|
| + This choice leads to several fun stories, e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twat
| showerst wrote:
| I think it's a conversion error on their part, 1000cm3 != 1m3
| cobaltoxide wrote:
| Agreed, the MW definition does not seem to be correct.
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(page generated 2021-10-28 23:01 UTC)