The Cambridge Dictionary announced on Sunday that it had added a slew of new words to the dictionary. With the new entries, British lexicographers nodded to the influence of the internet on the way we speak and write.
“Internet culture is changing the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary,” said the dictionary’s lexical programme manager, Colin McIntosh.
Among the words were “tradwife”, short for “traditional wife”, and “delulu”, an elongated abbreviation of “delusional”. Both are more notable for their connotations – the former of social conservatism expressed through marital behavior and the latter of the knowing, winking choice to follow a misinformed path – than their denotations.
Read the full story: ‘Skibidi’, ‘delulu’ and ‘tradwife’ among words added to Cambridge Dictionary
One other, in my mind more interesting, word was entered into the dictionary: skibidi, of “skibidi toilet” fame, referring to a series of animated shorts in which menacing human heads emerge from toilets and do battle with TV-headed men in suits. The toilets begin to sing a part of the song Dom Dom Yes Yes, which includes the line “Shtibididob dob dob dob dob yes yes” if the viewer is watching with sound. To English speakers, the first word has been transliterated to “skibidi”.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines skibidi as “a word that can have different meanings such as ‘cool’ or ‘bad’, or can be used with no real meaning as a joke’, an example of its use is: ‘What the skibidi are you doing?’”
When I was a child, my parents would look on in confusion as my siblings and I watched SpongeBob SquarePants on Saturdays. The show was incomprehensible to them in all ways – premise, plots, visuals, voices. Think of the animated toilets as a gen Alpha successor, delightful to children in bizarreness, doubly so because of the baffled looks on the faces of their parents.
“Tradwife” and “delulu” have fixed meanings that refer to real human actions and emotions. “Skibidi”, on the other hand, with its use as an emphatic, humorous filler word with “no real meaning”, per Cambridge refers to nothing so much as the hurtling feeling of scrolling through too many videos in one sitting. When we are so overwhelmed with moving images, conflicting perspectives, and advertising, what words are useful? Perhaps only skibidi.
Jean Baudrillard coined the concept of the “simulacra” – words or images without an origin in reality and which refer to no real thing – when writing about the media of his day, especially television. “Skibidi” is a likewise hyperreal word, referring only to the strange and continual refraction of meaning that a particular word has undergone online.
“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory,” he wrote in 1981.
The word does not precede the TikTok, nor survive it. Henceforth, it is the video that precedes the definition.
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