Shaun de Waal
The 10th edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary – released in South Africa this week -contains many new words, including a selection from South Africa.
English has always been an absorptive language, building itself, over the centuries, from Old Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, Greek and other tongues. The vast colonial empire of the British ensured that it colonised words as well, bringing veld, khaki, rajahand many others into the language. Today, as English expands into ever more of a global lingua franca, so it absorbs words from other languages and from slang.
Among the new terms in the 10th Concise are kundalini (yoga term for latent female energy at base of spine); illywhacker (small-time confidence trickster – Australian); and greenwash (disinformation put out by an organisation to make it appear eco-friendly).
South African words in the new Concise Oxford include baas, bundu, dwaal, eina, hamba, lekker, predikant, sommer, toyi- toyi, tricameral, veldskoen and wors.
It’s good to see South African English (or whatever hybrid of English and other languages it is we actually speak) acknowledged in so august a publication.
One does, however, wonder about a couple of these additions. A secondary meaning of veldskoen (not velskoen, note), as a modifier, is given as “conservative or reactionary”. Ican’t find anyone who’s heard of that usage.
And it might have been enlightening to explain that dwaal, n. (“dreamy, dazed or absent-minded state”)comes from the Afrikaans verb meaning to wander.
Auseful new feature in the 10th edition -as useful as the interpolations on usage, kept from earlier editions -is the series of boxes on word formation. They show how suffixes such as -graphy or -itis are joined to other lexemes (look it up)to make new terms.
Any help in understanding how language works is good. One might even describe such a feature as a lollapalooza -“a particularly impressive or attractive person or thing”. (Interestingly, the word, which has become associated with a set of American rock concerts, has 19th-century origins.)