It's been a good week for ...
new words
Photobomb has been named the 2014 Word of the Year after defeating competition from 50,000 new additions to the dictionary that include twerk, bakeoff and normcore.
While it has been referred to as far back as 2008, the photobomb received a powerful endorsement from Prince Harry and the Queen this year when they were both pictured photobombing athletes at the Commonwealth Games.
The photobomb is officially defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "to intrude into the background of a photograph without the subject's knowledge".
Publisher Collins explained its decision to coincide with the release of the 12th edition of its English Dictionary.
Collins cited an unprecedented level of high-profile photobombing, most notably Jennifer Lawrence photobombing Taylor Swift at the Golden Globes in January and the Queen, who photobombed Australian hockey players at the Commonwealth Games. To be fair, I don't actually think the Queen deliberately gatecrashed the pic. HRH doesn't exactly struggle to get her photie took.
It's been a bad week for ... new words
Back in the day, my secret weapons were the domesticated Tibetan yak and the three-toed sloth. Today's Scrabble fans require more in their arsenal to meet the challenges of the modern game.
Where I depended on a large dictionary to validate the zo/zho/dzo and the ai, players now need more than their wits about them. A new official Scrabble vocabulary list has caused outrage after it was found riddled with mistakes.
The Merriam-Webster word list contains errors such as "disrepects" instead of "disrespects" - and incorrect word variations such as "rabieses" as the plural of "rabies".
The new list - the first update of the Scrabble dictionary for a decade - was meant to make the game more attractive to young people by adding words such as "selfie", "bromance" and "dubstep".
Joel Sherman, a former world champion of the game, wrote on Facebook: "I'm merely disgusted by the low quality on every front, and the potential for disruption it has brought us."
Merriam-Webster said employees were "working diligently to ensure all errors are corrected".
In the meantime, I would recommend sticking to yaks and sloths. Unless, of course, photiebomb is listed.
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