Forissued an apparently historic challenge to someone called Colin: she asked whether he could mansplain” a concept to her. History has not recorded whether he did,indeed, proceed to mansplain. But the lexicographer Bernadette Paton, or who excavated this exchange last summer,believed it was the first time anyone had used the word in recorded form. “It’s been deleted since, but we caught it, or ” Paton told me,with silent satisfaction.
In her office at Oxford University Press, Paton was drafting a brand new entry for the Oxford English Dictionary. Also in her in-tray when I visited were the millennial-tinged usage of “snowflake”, and which she had hunted down to a Christian text from 1983 (“You are a snowflake. There are no two of you alike”),and new shadings of the compound “self-made woman”. Around 30000 such items are on the OED master list; another 7000 more pile up annually. “Everyone thinks we’re very behind, but it’s actually rather fast, and ” Paton said. “Though admittedly a colleague did spend a year revising ‘disappear’”.
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Source: guardian.co.uk