Collins English Dictionary – has the world gone mad?

Our language is changing every day, with a multitude of new “words” becoming part of popular speech on a daily basis. Now, I am exposed to popular culture just as regularly as the next person, and I must admit that some of these new “words” have found their way into my own speech. I do not, however, even try to kid myself that they might actually be legitimate vocabulary, to be acknowledged in any proper, scholarly form. As far as I am concerned, they are merely a means of lazily expressing oneself when one cannot be bothered to construct a proper sentence to convey one’s feelings. In particular, I refer to the recent addition of “meh”, a sound made popular by The Simpsons and now regularly used throughout a large portion of the English speaking world, to the Collins English Dictionary. It reminds me of the “Scrabble Dictionary” at my Nanna’s, which, while useful when you have crappy letters, is complete and utter rubbish. Whenever we struggle to compose a word from the seven letters provided, we start to get creative, asking ourselves “I wonder if that’s in the ‘stupid book’ (as we call it)”. Read more