Haven't signed into your Scholastic account before?
Teachers, not yet a subscriber?
Subscribers receive access to the website and print magazine.
You are being redirecting to Scholastic's authentication page...
Announcements & Tutorials
Explore Primary Sources
How Students and Families Can Log In
1 min.
Setting Up Student View
Sharing Articles with Your Students
2 min.
Interactive Activities
4 min.
Sharing Videos with Students
Using Upfront with Educational Apps
5 min.
Join Our Facebook Group!
Exploring the Archives
Powerful Differentiation Tools
3 min.
World and U.S. Almanac & Atlas
Subscriber Only Resources
Access this article and hundreds more like it with a subscription to The New York TImes Upfront magazine.
Article Options
Presentation View
New Words, From Yoda to YOLO
Think the English language doesn’t change? Fuhgeddaboudit! The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.), which since 1884 has been tracking how English is spoken around the world, adds new words every few months. The latest entries include yogalates, a mix of yoga and Pilates; ’Merica, a word denoting “emblematic qualities of American traditions”; fuhgeddaboudit, a phrase “used to indicate that a suggested scenario is unlikely or undesirable”; and Yoda, which means a wise elder, like the Star Wars Jedi master. “Language is always changing, and new vocabularies are always being generated,” says Jonathan Dent of the O.E.D. Of course, sometimes words you think are new actually have old roots. The phrase “you only live once,” for example, first appeared in Honore de Balzac’s 1847 novel Le Cousin Pons, but recently made it into the O.E.D. after becoming a popular acronym: “YOLO!”