I get the impression that Jack Garland, Associated Press Writer, and the Oxford University Press staff many not really get the Muppets — or Winnie the Pooh. ‘Muppet,’ ‘Eeyorish’ Join Oxford Lexicon:
Are you feeling like a ‘muppet’ because you cannot remember the meaning of a word? Or are you a bit ‘Eeyorish’ and confused at our rapidly changing language? Those are among 3,000 new words and expressions, many of them slang or foreign, that have entered English usage and are included in the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, which is being released Thursday.‘Muppet,’ taken from the children’s TV show, ‘Sesame Street,’ means a foolish person, while ‘Eeyorish’ refers to the character in Winnie the Pooh known for his gloomy outlook on life.
Since when is a muppet a foolish person?
Anyway, a number of technical and ethnic terms have entered the language recently:
Thus “blog” (short for Web log), and “egosurfing” (searching the Internet for references to oneself) are joined in the dictionary by more unusual phrases such as “shotgun cloning” (the insertion of random fragments of DNA).
[...]
“Chacha” is a Hindi word for uncle, “doudou” is a West Indian term of endearment, “sic bo” is a Chinese game of dice, and “bashert” is a yiddish word for fate.The U.S. influence is evident in “bada bing,” the name of Tony Soprano’s strip-joint in the hit HBO show “The Sopranos.” The phrase is defined as “an effortless act.”
The term “24/7″ has officially entered common usage in the United Kingdom, as have “nerd,” “geek,” and “bad-hair day.”
The more unpleasant side of modern life pops up with “counterterrorism,” “dirty bomb,” and “mission creep” all included in the dictionary.
On a lighter note, words from office life often crop up. “Prairie-dogging” is a term describing workers in cubicles who raise their heads above the partitions surrounding their desks to see what is going on.