In the most recent quarterly online update, the people who hold the reigns on the Oxford Dictionary have added the word ‘twerking’ to the database of English language words. Scrabble players everywhere rejoice. While the word ‘twerk’ has certainly been around for many years in a colloquial sense, it is really in the last year that we can credit (blame?) Diplo with skyrocketing the dance craze into mainstream popularity. Indeed, twerking has taken the last year by storm. From students facing suspension, to Mad Decent’s Major Lazer, to the most recent VMA fiasco featuring the young lady formerly heralded as America’s Disney sweetheart – twerking has evolved into somewhat of a pop culture phenomenon. A representative from the Oxford dictionary comments
“By last year, it had generated enough currency to be added to our new words watch list, and by this spring, we had enough evidence of usage frequency in a breadth of sources to consider adding it to our dictionaries of current English.”
And so it came to be that ‘twerking’ is now an official word of the English language.
via –BBC UK
