Month: October 2019

by Jackson Elliot   Consider yourself lucky if you started learning English before last year. With Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s addition of 1,373 new words and 4,000 revisions since 2018, you got in on the ground floor. There’s also some bad news. The new words include several additions and definition changes that politicize language and drive it leftward. Here are seven of Merriam-Webster’s most recent left-wing words. 1. Woke: Perhaps the most “woke” of all the new words, the publisher says this one is a slang term for being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” If Gillette runs an ad campaign that suggests real violence against women can be stopped by one guy tapping another guy on the shoulder to remind him not to harass people, that’s “woke.” 2. They: At Merriam-Webster, they’re saying we should use “they” to “refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.” This decision follows hundreds of years of English speakers who have used words like “he” or “she.” 3. Mansplain: The publisher says this means “To explain something to a woman in a condescending way that assumes she has no knowledge about the…