If you thought the peeps down at Oxford Dictionaries were a bunch of squares toiling away in obscure lingo, dusty Latin origins and variations of the word “celibacy,” think again.
Last week, they decided to go to the dank side and announced that “vape” was its 2014 Word of the Year.
In case you don’t know, “vape” is an abbreviation of vapour or vapourize and is a verb that means “to inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device.”
According to the vape heads at Oxford, “both the device and the action can also be known as a vape. The associated noun vaping is also listed.” Or used in a sentence: “Our intern at the Courier mistakenly thought that vaping on her vape during an editorial story meeting was appropriate. It was not.”
Of course, the word vape is often associated with smoking pot, which makes Oxford’s choice seem like a concerted attempt to hang with the cool crowd. Especially since they only added the word and definition to its ranks in August, giving it a mere three months to rise to Word of the Year status. Incidentally, “budtender” (a person whose job is to serve customers in a cannabis dispensary or shop) was also a contender, and we’re pretty sure no one in their right mind actually says that word out loud.
Perhaps feeling a little paranoid, the smoky the bears at Oxford Dictionaries felt to the need to further explain their chose of vape: “As e-cigarettes (or e-cigs) have become much more common, so vape has grown significantly in popularity. You are 30 times more likely to come across the word vape than you were two years ago, and usage has more than doubled in the past year.” Oxford even provides a graph supporting this assertion on their website, and to their credit it looks wicked cool when you’re high and stare at it for long periods of time. Kind of like an oblique mountain range where gnomes would probably live. Or so we’re told.
But what bothers K&K most about the Oxford Dictionaries’ trendy, short-sighted and rather desperate choice for Word of the Year is that they, once again, ignored our yearly submissions. Namely: “penile hydra,” “free-range crotch chickens” and “bwamff” (the sound a Hostess Twinkie makes when you’re under the influence and hold it up to your ear and crush it in your bare hand). As if you didn’t know.
