It was an inevitability, really, but that still doesn’t prevent us from shuddering a little bit upon hearing that ‘twerking’, the act of rolling your bum around rhythmically that is somehow being referred to as a “popular dance craze”, and ‘selfie’, the word given to describe a person taking a photograph of themselves, typically in a bathroom mirror, are now officially in the Oxford English Dictionary.
This follows Miley Cyrus’ very uninhibited display of twerking all over the lower-half of Robin Thicke’s body at the VMAs, which confused/angered/disgusted/aroused many viewers and raised the ire of America’s Parents Television Council, who accused MTV of sexually exploiting young women.
The Oxford Dictionaries’ Katherine Connor Martin spoke to the BBC about the decision to officially recognise the word twerking in the dictionary, saying: “By last year, it had generated enough currency to be added to our new words watch list, and by the spring, we had enough evidence of usage frequency in a breadth of sources to consider adding it to our dictionaries of current English.
“There are many theories about the origin of this word, and since it arose in oral use, we may never know the answer for sure. The current public reaction to twerking is reminiscent in some ways of how the twisting craze was regarded in the early 1960s, when it was first popularised by Chubby Checker’s song, ‘The Twist’.”
What have we become.
