Of crashes and Oxford Dictionary entries

I returned from vacation (not vacay) to find my hard drive dead. As in bereft of life, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. As a result, I lost August’s Lexicide article, a smashing collection of portmanteau words in the business world, with suggestions from you readers.

Never fear. Today on the Oxford Dictionary blog are two appropriately relevant articles. “Business Jargon in the Mainstream” leads with a word I had not included in my piece: solopreneur. Since most entrepreneurs are one-person shows, I fail to see why this word is necessary. But that’s okay! I fail to see why most portmanteau creations are necessary. A threepeat is still just a repeated action and all marketing should be smart, whether it’s smarketing or not!

Also featured on Oxford’s blog is an update on new wordsHangry is cute and conveys a unique sensibility, but manspreading reminds me too much of meggingsmurse, and mandals, words I have lamented before. Of course, manspreading defines an action not defined elsewhere and, unlike the other words, doesn’t try to differentiate something that is genderless as masculine.

So stay tuned. I will reconstruct my article and return in force.

– Otto E. Mezzo