"word" news and stories

It's not the OED, but everyone's favorite Rachael Ray-ism is about to become an official part of our language, due for inclusion in the next edition of the Oxford American College Dictionary. The entry will read "EVOO: abbr. extra-virgin olive oil." The news was broken last week on Rachael Ray's talk show by the editor of the dictionary, who also spoke about how difficult it is to get words into the dictionary.

It makes you wonder if more people will buy the dictionary because of the new Rachael Ray connection, small though it is. It seems like the people buying the college edition of a dictionary are the most likely to turn to the internet (where you can easily find lots of info on EVOO) than to a reference book.

By the way - the cute shirt pictured here? It's available at the Rachael Ray shop.

Source

It appears that I've made it through the 24 years of my life without having encountered the word gorp. You can imagine my surprise when, on a recent car trip, my girlfriend referred to the bag of peanuts, raisins and chocolate chips that I packed, asking "Where's the gorp?" Gorp came up in conversation again the other day, so I decided to do a little research. The origins of the word are cloudy at best. According to a Wikipedia entry, gorp may be a "backronym," an acronym created to match the letters of a word that already exists, standing for Good Old Raisins and Peanuts or Granola Oats Raisins and Peanuts. I'm skeptical of the latter because granola generally contains oats anyway, so that would be redundant. Apparently gorp is also known as scroggin in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Iraq. Supposedly, this may also be an acronym.

[Photo: Wikipedia]

Eric (who's great, we hear) was wondering whether it's "doughnuts" or "donuts." So I'll do my best to answer.

Doughnuts is clearly the original spelling. According to the wiki on the subject, it's the only spelling listed in Thorndike and Lorge's The Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words.

I have no idea why that book is an authority. Usually, the Oxford English Dictionary is considered the be-all and end-all for words. But the British, well, they don't know from doughnuts, according to the Word Detective. He says it's a purely American treat, and the word's earliest known use was in Washington Irving's 1809 account of life in New York, when he described "balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog fat." There were no holes in the original version.

In my opinion, "Donut" is no better than "Minit" or "Kwik" or "Kopy" - a dumb misspelling created for cute-itude. It seems to date from the 1950s, when Dunkin' Donuts first hit the scene. So, then, "doughnut" is correct, unless you're referring to the products of the double D.