Dear OED,

Let’s talk.

On this day of an unreasonable number of people being accepted into higher education institutions (because the system does not care about whether a higher education qualification is appropriate, they only see the £9,000 a year paycheck per admission), it has been announced that you are helping the decline of proper learning by once again including silly words in your dictionary.

Now, I don’t mean to be wordist. I am an advocate of the ever-changing language, and I do strongly believe that English grows and evolves constantly. However, can we just take a second to go over some of your choices…

YOLO. This is not something to encourage. We were all perfectly happy with Carpe Diem, which is significantly more meaningful than YOLO anyway. If anything YOLO should be a warning to be less daring.

Binge-Watch. Why does this need to be defined? I know the definitions of both these words so I feel it’s fairly obvious what they mean together. This is what I’m talking about when I suggest you are dumbing-down. This. Right here.

Adorbs. This isn’t a word, this is a silly contraction. If you need to head to the OED to work out what this means, I think I respect you more.

This is just a selection, OED. But there are more, and you know it. I know it’s just your online version now, but where does it stop? Is this purposefully just fodder for linguistics students of the future? It was bad enough when you graced ‘selfie’ with word of the year status.

Like I said before, this isn’t meant to be wordist. There are some great words on the list. I just want you to have some self respect OED. Some of these words don’t need to be graced with your interest. Don’t insult yourself by associating yourself with words better placed in the mouth of a TOWIE star or Kanye West. No-one is expecting this of you, you don’t need to be “down with the kids”. The kids are stupid.

Yours,

A slightly stuck-up (ok, VERY stuck-up) language lover.