EVOO In The Oxford American College Dictionary
March 22, 2007 by Tracey Thompson
Filed under Food & Nutrition
I had seen this story back in December, but was reminded about it while watching a Chefography on The Food Network about Rachael Ray. Love her or hate her, she is leaving her mark everywhere. I just don’t think that this is one of her great legacies.
One of her Rachaelisms has been added to the Oxford American College Dictionary. “EVOO” has received the stamp of approval by the editor-in-chief of American Dictionaries. The 2007 edition has our new word gracing its pages.
According to Erin McKean:
“In order for a word to get into the dictionary it has to be useful to people. It’s not just enough to be a fabulous celebrity to get your word in. You have to make a word that people like to use. There are words that are connected with celebrities that are not going to make it in the dictionary anytime soon; we’re not going to put in “Brangelina.” But “EVOO” we see people using. We have a big database of about a billion and a half English words. In that database we found evidence of “EVOO” being used and in more than half of the examples, “Rachael” is also in the same sentence.”
I have a hard time buying this explanation. Is a lazy acronym really a word? I admit that I am a bad offender when it comes to abusing the English language; but I would never want the literate world to condone my horrible misuse of my native tounge. I once thought that the French government was ridiculous to have the equivalent of the Word Police in their country, now I am beginning to think that maybe it is not too bad of an idea.
Well, this will probably be good news to Scrabble players.
Lets see, some acronyms that have made it into the dictionary due to regular use in common everyday language: NORAD, SCUBA, RADAR, SONAR, AA, EPA, the list goes on and on. Even Xerox lost its copyright at about the same time it was put in the dictionary as a word meaning copy. So, just wait, WTF might make it in after all.