The OED's New Food Words: Bánh Mì, Doughnut Hole & Nom Nom
Flickr/ninniane
Language is as adaptive as cuisine, or the notion of a brick-and-mortar restaurant, and so it shouldn't surprise anyone that it changes. The folks at the Oxford English Dictionary routinely add new words, regularizing slang and terms from other languages, and have recently added not a few food words. Their updated list, published on March 24th, revises more than 1,900 entries and adds new words from across the dictionary, including what they call "initialisms," which means that LOL, OMG and BFF have now been canonized. Alert your teenager. And your teenager's English teacher.
To the list of recognized culinary terms we can now add: bánh mì, taquito, kleftiko, California roll, Eton mess, rugelach, sammich, roulade, doughnut hole, nom nom (the Nom Nom Truck should add an OED sandwich, or sammich maybe), gremolata, muffin top and cream-crackered. Oh, and "la-la land" has also been added, although you will not read that on this blog if we have anything to say about it. If you don't know the definitions, hey, you can now look them up. And no, Rachael Ray is not on the OED editorial board as, to our knowledge, "yum-o" has not yet made the cut. Maybe next year.
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