Your Internet Jargon’s an Omnishambles? Srsly, Read This

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Buzzworthy words added to Oxford Dictionaries Online – squee!

We’ve just added some srsly buzzworthy words to our online dictionary – squee! With influences ranging from technology to fashion, there is something for everyone in the update.

If you are someone who always leaves prepping for a party to the last minute, you’ll be relieved to know that you can now click and collect, so you can avoid a mad trolley dash to grab some cake pops or blondies before your guests arrive. And don’t forget some pear cider to wash down all those tasty treats.

Even if your party turns into an omnishambles, full of people in double denim doing dad dancing, try not to worry. You’ll soon feel better after a bit of me time: a few minutes in the child’s pose, a chilled michelada, and a Nordic noir will have you feeling as right as rain.

The additions may have only just entered the dictionary, but we’ve been watching them for a while now, tracking how and where they are used. Two of the words to make their debut in the dictionary, selfie and phablet both featured on our Words on the radar post back in June 2012. At the time, selfie featured primarily in social media contexts, but had attracted media attention after Hillary Clinton apparently used the word in a text message to the owner of a Tumblr dedicated to an image of her texting.

Omnishambles, which is new this quarter, was Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2012. At the time of choosing, it wasn’t clear whether or not it would find its way into one of our dictionaries. But it has continued to gain momentum since then, and is now deserving of an entry.

Several fashion terms also make their Oxford dictionary debut this season including flatform, geek chic, and jorts. Jorts is a good example of a blend (also known as a portmanteau), a word which is a combination of two words in which part of one or both words is omitted (with jorts being a blend of jeans and shorts). And it’s in good company, with babymoon and fauxhawk also entering the dictionary.

Of course blends may be a popular way to form new words, but let’s also tip our hats to our old friends the initialism and the acronym. It’s not just LOL and OMG that have made their way into the mainstream, this update sees the addition of a variety of new acronyms and initialisms, from the familial quartet of FIL, MIL, BIL, and SIL, to the technical BYOD and the time-saving TL;DR. [ed. note: hyperlink added]

FOMO? Take a look at our selection of the additions to Oxford Dictionaries Online and see if you can tell your MIL from your MOOC.

apols

A/W

babymoon

balayage

bitcoin

blondie

buzzworthy

BYOD

cake pop

chandelier earring

click and collect

dappy

derp

digital detox

double denim

emoji

fauxhawk

FIL

flatform

FOMO

food baby

geek chic

girl crush

grats

guac

hackerspace

Internet of things

jorts

LDR

me time

MOOC

omnishambles

pear cider

phablet

pixie cut

selfie

space tourism

squee

srsly

street food

TL;DR

twerk

unlike

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/08/new-words-august-2013/

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Midtown Manhattan in 3 Minutes

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Watch New York City Come Alive in This Amazing Timelapse

by Marina Koren, Smithsonian.com, June 13, 2013

Photographer Drew Geraci decided to turn New York City's fact-paced lifestyle up another notch.

The time-lapse stars midtown Manhattan, one of the most bustling spots on the island, and condenses more than 50,000 still frames from six months of shooting at 100 locations in less than three minutes.

“We wanted to get that feeling of what it was like to be in Midtown where everything’s happening,” says Geraci, a Washington, D.C.-based photographer and videographer. “Find the coolest locations and really find something unique about those locations, and shoot them in a way that maybe hasn’t been shot before."

Bird’s eye views from towering rooftops show the ebb and flow of people and cars on the streets below. Down at street level, Geraci captured scenes from moving taxicabs. Some of the city’s most recognizable landmarks make an appearance: The Empire State and Flatiron Buildings, Grand Central Station, Central Park and, of course, Times Square.

“It was really an amazing experience for us to go over there and capture the city from all different angles,” says Geraci, who owns production company District 7 Media with Arthur Breese. The pair used four Canon 5D Mark IIIs with wide-angle lenses, a six-foot dolly and several stop-motion rigs to capture the footage. They then mixed in natural sound recorded at each scene—cars honking, neon signs buzzing, boats blowing their horns out on the water.

Geraci and Breese scouted the locations beforehand and received permission or permits to shoot there, except for the subway system, where MTA workers asked them to leave when the duo tried to set up their tripods. “We had to figure out a way to time the train, put out the tripod, get the camera ready, maybe shoot 400 frames and then book it out of there,” Geraci says.

The photographer says he likes the atmosphere of the city that never sleeps. “There’s a different feel for every different city, but they all have that one common element of lots of people, traffic and really neat architecture,” he says. “I think [New York] is the big city of the United States, so I have to pay homage to it.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Watch-New-York-City-Come-Alive-in-This-Amazing-Timelapse-219285761.html#ixzz2cEouNrWa

 

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The United (in name only) States of America

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Carving Up the Country

by CHARLES M. BLOW

July 26, 2013

Our 50 states seem to be united in name only.

In fact, we seem to be increasingly becoming two countries under one flag: Liberal Land — coastal, urban and multicultural — separated by Conservative Country — Southern and Western, rural and racially homogeneous. (Other parts of the country are a bit of a mixed bag.)

This has led to incredible and disturbing concentrations of power.

As The New York Times reported after the election in November, more than two-thirds of the states are now under single-party control, meaning that one party has control of the governor’s office and has majorities in both legislative chambers.

This is the highest level of such control since 1952. And Republicans have single-party control in nearly twice as many states as Democrats.

This is having very real consequences on the ground, nowhere more clearly than on the subjects of voting rights and women’s reproductive rights.

Almost all jurisdictions covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the section that requires federal approval for any change in voting procedures and that the Supreme Court effectively voided last month — are in Republican-controlled states.

So, many of those states have wasted no time following the court ruling to institute efforts to suppress the vote in the next election and beyond.

Within two hours of the Supreme Court ruling, Texas announced that a voter identification law that the Department of Justice had blocked for two years because “Hispanic registered voters are more than twice as likely as non-Hispanic registered voters to lack such identification” would go into effect, along with a redistricting map passed in 2011 but blocked by a federal court.

The department is trying to prevent those actions in Texas, but it’s unclear whether the state or the feds will prevail.

Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina have also moved forward with voter ID bills that had already passed but were being held up by the Justice Department. (Virginia has passed a bill that’s scheduled to go into effect next year.)

And on Wednesday, a federal court gave Florida the go-ahead to resume its controversial voter purge by dismissing a case filed against the state that had been rendered moot by the Supreme Court decision.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not surprised by this flurry. She voted with the minority on the Voting Rights Act case, and she wrote in a strongly worded dissent: “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proved effective. The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer needed.”

She continued, “With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.”

History does appear to be doing just that. In an interview this week with The Associated Press, Ginsburg reiterated her displeasure with the court’s decision and her lack of surprise at what it has wrought, saying, “And one really could have predicted what was going to happen.” She added, “I didn’t want to be right, but sadly I am.”

While Republicans may claim that voter ID laws are about the sanctity of the vote, Republican power brokers know they’re about much more: suppressing the votes of people likely to vote Democratic.

Last week Rob Gleason, the Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman, discussed the effects of his state’s voter ID laws on last year’s presidential election, acknowledging to the Pennsylvania Cable Network: “We probably had a better election. Think about this: we cut Obama by 5 percent, which was big. A lot of people lost sight of that. He won — he beat McCain by 10 percent; he only beat Romney by 5 percent. I think that probably voter ID helped a bit in that.” [emphasis added]

[Ed. Note: Finally a politician tells it like it is. Voter fraud in the United States is a minuscule problem. Disenfranchising minorities by imposing voter ID laws is a huge, purely politically motivated problem.]

And on women’s reproductive rights, as the Guttmacher Institute reported earlier this month, “In the first six months of 2013, states enacted 106 provisions related to reproductive health and rights.” The report continued, “Although initial momentum behind banning abortion early in pregnancy appears to have waned, states nonetheless adopted 43 restrictions on access to abortion, the second-highest number ever at the midyear mark and is as many as were enacted in all of 2012.”

A substantial majority of the new restrictive measures — which include bans on abortion outside incredibly restrictive time frames (at six weeks after the woman’s last period in North Dakota), burdensome regulations on abortion clinics and providers, and forced ultrasounds — were enacted in states with Republican-controlled legislatures.

These are just two issues among many in which the cleaving of this country is becoming an incontrovertible fact, as we drift back toward bifurcation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/blow-carving-up-the-country.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130727&_r=0

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