Meaning Of Bovine

The curious search online as dictionaries gather dust

Here come the new words, rolling towards us in their shiny, multi-hued novelty like the thousands of coloured balls that cascaded down a street in a television commercial.

These are the words that have just joined the language, and have been included in the 12th edition of the Chambers Dictionary .

You won't be surprised to learn that "retweet" and "vuvuzela" have been admitted to the language, with over-used terms such as "national treasure" and recessional cliches such as "double dip" and "quantitative easing".

Other new entries take a moment for their meaning to become clear. There's "crowdsourcing" (meaning to canvass suggestions from the general public before adopting a course of action), "freegan" (someone who finds all their food, gratis, in supermarket bins), "upcycle" (to transform waste products into better-quality products) and "globesity" (the worldwide outbreak of morbid fatness in civilised countries).

There'll be more arriving in a few months, as Oxford University Press, its Cambridge equivalent and the other dictionary publishers bring out new editions with their own cargo of neologisms.

You may detect a note of desperation in their pronouncements. But they have much to despair about.

Bluntly put, dictionaries are in trouble, and have been for years.

The big, dusty, 2000-page family dictionary has become surplus to requirements, as potential users have turned to the internet for their definitions. The figures for 2010 show that spending on dictionaries fell for the seventh consecutive year.

Single-language and bilingual dictionaries dropped 13 per cent. Other reference books, including atlases, sank by 10 per cent.

But as early as 2007 some publishers were predicting that paper dictionaries would die out as the word-curious turned online. And if they go the way of reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and camera film, we'll have lost a substantial source of intellectual delight: the reference shelf.

Vegans, Vegetarians and Lacto-Ovo-Meli-Pesco-Pollo-Porcine-Ovis ...

- What do you call a vegetarian who eats fish but not dairy?

Vegan, vegetarian, freegan, herbivore, locavore, plant-based diet, cheesatarian, cheegan, beegan, part-time vegan, part-time vegetarian, pesco-vegan, lacto-ovo vegan, flexitarian, strict vegetarian, Lebanese vegetarian

Argh!! make it stop…..  so many labels, so little time to read the dictionary

Every time a person calls themselves a vegetarian but continues to eat animals, the result is, it just makes life more complicated for the real vegetarians.

Same with vegan , when someone eats dairy, or wears leather, eats seafood, but says, they are vegan, it just makes life much more difficult for the real vegans who try to convince others that – No, vegans don’t, in fact, eat fish, wear leather, drink milk, buy Cover Girl cosmetics .

Without discounting the possible good a mostly-vegetarian-but-not-quite could do….   If they eat meat they are not vegetarian.

So, perhaps, we need a new word for people who try hard – perhaps something like: potential-vegetarian, mostly-vegetarian, transitioning-vegetarian.

The same goes for people who claim the badge of VEGAN, yet deliberately consume animal products or wear animal products. (I do not count people who have their food spiked in this category, some chefs still think that is funny, what matters is intent).