Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

news.sky.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: 'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

#11

Post by serf »

TillE wrote: post #9
lucideer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact they've included that paragraph doesn't invalidate the question. Cambridge used to add ~500, maybe as many as 1000 words annually. In recent years it's climbed to 2000 but 6000 is rather unprecedented.

I think despite having lived through it, it's easy to miss just how transformative smartphones and social media have been to human society. There's been an absolute explosion in communication. In the early years of the internet it was pretty exciting and novel to be able to talk to people from other countries. Now it's completely unremarkable. All this of course has a huge effect on how language develops and is used,…

counterpoint:

i've been on my phone/social/media/etc through the entire trend and this is the only time i've ever read the word 'delulu'; I had to look it up.

Might I suggest that tribe matters a lot in this context?

I don't listen to k-pop, I don't watch machinima, and I only knew 'tradwife' from the bullshit politics associated with the concept..

I think Cambridge called these too early. Maybe i'm old, and maybe i'm sheltered, but I never hear these words used in real life aside from a young nephew who was into the toilet thing, and he didn't so much use the word as just scream SKIBIDI while dancing around the room.

I'm fine with being old. Some trends you prefer to see sail away from you.

Re: 'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

#13

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

pringk02 wrote: post #12

There is an article of this kind every year where we all get a chance to be up in arms about the fact that language and culture is ever-shifting and changing and not something static.

The comments here really remind of the usual debate around Wikipedia.

Some people really want to see these tools as guardian and judge determining what should be worthy of inclusion rather than tools describing a reality external to them.

Maybe old age really is a shipwreck after all.

Re: 'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

#16

Post by 3836293648 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #7
xdfgh1112 wrote: post #4

Weird. Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reeks of capitalising on the zeitgeist for PR

> Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reels of capitalising the zeitgeist for PR Delulu is more than a decade old. > it's a physical dictionary after all Is the Cambridge Dictionary still physical-first? I know the OED has been digital-first since at least around the turn of the millenium (the last full physical e…

The OED has been what since when?

How was their website so utterly unusable for so many years then? That's the entire reason I use the Cambridge now

Re: 'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

#17

Post by qn9n »

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #4

Weird. Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reeks of capitalising on the zeitgeist for PR

> The Oxford English Dictionary is often considered the more authoritative source on the English language, whereas the Cambridge Dictionary focuses more on modern usage.

Re: 'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

#19

Post by defrost »

serf wrote: post #11
TillE wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think despite having lived through it, it's easy to miss just how transformative smartphones and social media have been to human society. There's been an absolute explosion in communication. In the early years of the internet it was pretty exciting and novel to be able to talk to people from other countries. Now it's completely unremarkable. All this of course has a huge effect on how language develops and is used,…

counterpoint: i've been on my phone/social/media/etc through the entire trend and this is the only time i've ever read the word 'delulu'; I had to look it up. Might I suggest that tribe matters a lot in this context? I don't listen to k-pop, I don't watch machinima, and I only knew 'tradwife' from the bullshit politics associated with the concept.. I think Cambridge called these too early. Maybe i'm old, and maybe i'…

Counterpoint:

Delulu made it to Hansard*, the official government record of a G20 five eyes nation.

  As an example, the Cambridge University Press cited a 2025 speech in parliament where Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese used the phrase "delulu with no solulu" during the last sitting week before the election.
* https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard

Re: 'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

#20

Post by h4ch1 »

Is this "progress" or are we glorifying moving backwards by including this sort of language just to be "in"?

I really don't know how to feel about this, maybe it's my education making me bigoted, looking down upon what's clearly ephemeral; slang words like these come and go with time, and I think the timeframe for words to be included in the dictionary has greatly reduced.

Almost no one apart from a very small, terminally online subset of people will ever use these words and an even smaller subset will use these in IRL conversation; adding these is a bad idea and doesn't bode well for dictionaries wrt credibility.

They should release a DLC for dictionaries that covers slang like this, not make it part of the official English specification.

Post reply on HN