Are you a digital nomad? Are you mad farming now in hell? Then congratulations, you deadass helped enter new terms into Dictionary.com in the latest update.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made us more familiar with people who are lucky enough to telecommute while living the digital nomad life on the road, and you’ve definitely seen people who are angry about farming (defined as “tactics of deliberate provocation of political opponents”) of the problem. hellscape (“a place or time that is hopeless, unbearable, or irredeemable”) is the online discourse today.
And as for deadass … it’s a flexible term that can mean “serious, thorough, true, sincere, or true; indeed.”
These are just four of the 313 new words, 130 new definitions and 1,140 revised definitions added to Dictionary.com’s online language repository in its latest revision.
“Language, as always, is constantly changing,” said John Kelly, senior editorial director at Dictionary.com, in a statement. “Our team of lexicographers is documenting and contextualizing that inexorable twist in the English language — not only to help us better understand our changing times, but how the times we live in are changing. or, rather, our language.”
Other additions include trauma dumping, petfluencer, antifragile and endless chemicals, the latter referring to the widespread problem of PFAS in the environment.
The pandemic also helped usher in new health-related terms such as superdodger, meaning “anyone, for unproven reasons, who remains uninfected or asymptomatic even after re- repeated exposure to an infectious virus.”
The latest edition of the dictionary also sees the addition or change of several terms related to gaming and, for some reason, bread. Paratha, anyone?
Nobody is saying that our language should be gluten-free, and I deadass think that our discourse and our pizza are better for it.