Dictionary.com is adding more than 300 words and definitions to its latest lexicon update to reflect changes in the culture, along with what appears to be, in part, a dollop or more of corporate political correctness.
New additions, abbreviations, and expanded explanations include 5G, content warning, cultural appropriation, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), deplatform, JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion), long COVID, side hustle, TW (trigger warning), yeet, and zaddy.
“The latest update to our dictionary continues to mirror the world around us…it’s a complicated and challenging society we live in, and language changes to help us grapple with it. But sometimes language changes just for fun,” John Kelly, the online platform’s managing editor, said in a statement.
“Perhaps these lighter slang and pop culture newcomers to our dictionary reflect another important aspect of our time—a cautious optimism and a brighter mood about the future ahead after a trying 2020,” he added.
“Changes in the branding of major products such as Aunt Jemima and Edy’s Pies are now documented on Dictionary.com and reflect a shift away from the use of racist stereotypes in marketing,” Dictionary.com also explained. The former is now known as Pearl Milling Company and the latter was formerly known as Eskimo Pies.
According to Dictionary.com, yeet is “an exclamation of enthusiasm, approval, triumph, pleasure, joy, etc.”
Let’s give credit where credit is due! Starting around at least 2005, Black social media gave us the now-ubiquitous ‘yeet.’
It’s now in https://t.co/OeJELgy3YL, and can be a joyful interjection, or a verb for forms of quick, forceful motions. https://t.co/n0vPMrkoTb
— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) July 14, 2021
And zaddy is “an attractive man who is also stylish, charming, and self-confident,” according to the digital compilation.
Ex-NBA player Kwame Brown, who has developed a massive YouTube following practically overnight, often uses the term “zaddy” to describe those purported behind-the-scenes bosses who are allegedly giving counter-productive marching orders to divisive, virtue-signaling media personalities whom he deems the go-along-get-along gang.
Entirely separately, the New York Post claims that “Law & Order” actor Christopher Meloni has inspired “memes and shout outs dubbing him a ‘zaddy.'”
We now have an entry for ‘zaddy,’ popularized by @tydollasign. It means an attractive man who is also stylish, charming, and self-confident. Here it is used in a sentence:
“https://t.co/OeJELgy3YL‘s social media manager is a zaddy.” https://t.co/gokmhjGjPb
— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) July 14, 2021
Dictionary.com got into vocabulary beef late last year when it redefined the term court-packing to seemingly comply with Democrat spin. There is a cohort of the Democrat Party that wants to expand the U.S. Supreme Court to 15 members as a way to dilute the current conservative, or perceived conservative, majority with the addition of far-left activist judges.
The original definition, which centered on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unsuccessful efforts to add justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who would rubber-stamp his New Deal policies, was bumped to second place.
In response to the glossary controversy, Dictionary.com announced on social media that “Language evolves. So do we.”
Dictionary.com is also one of several organizations that designates a word (or phrase) of the year as each calendar year winds down.
In late 2020, Dictionary.com, perhaps not surprisingly, chose pandemic (as did Merriam-Webster) as its word of the year. Unprecedented was Dictionary.com’s “people’s choice” word of the year for 2020. The prestigious Oxford Dictionary concluded, however, that 2020 was so unprecedented that the year could not be summed up by just one word.
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Robert Jonathan is a staff writer for BizPac Review. He is a longtime writer/editor for news aggregation websites and has also developed content in the legal and financial publishing sectors as well as for online education. He earned a Juris Doctorate from the University of Connecticut School of Law, “a law school the basketball teams can be proud of.”
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