Coming up on Word Matters, are dictionaries supposed to enter the words no one's ever heard of,
or only the words everyone already knows?
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Wipster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Wipster editors Amon Shea, Peter Sokolowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Would you buy a dictionary if it only contained words you already knew?
Or do you like being confronted in your dictionary,
as we ourselves are, by lexical strangers unheard of in daily life?
Ammon's been looking at what sorts of words Merriam-Webster has historically used to entice dictionary readers into buying a new edition.
There are some surprises.
In a recent episode, we spent some time talking about a batch of new words,
fresh words, that we just added to the dictionary.
Some of these are new words, some of these are old words that we just know,
adding, but it's an update.
And there were a number of words which some people loved or didn't know about.
Somebody had a kind of interesting reaction that was a writer named Mora Holman wrote a piece online,
title of which is True Life, I'm a Millennial,
and I don't know most of the new words Miriam Webster just added.
And the subhead is 30-somethings have aged out of using a dictionary, apparently.