In order to make room for more modern, soon-to-be-eternal terminology such as “sexting,” “retweet,” “woot,” and “jeggings,” the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has been forced to clear away obsolete brush like “cassette player,” which previously defined the system of cranks and pulleys used by man to extract the sounds of El DeBarge from crude spools of magnetic tape. While it will technically linger on in the unabridged edition of the OED, as well as the memories of old and boring people who drone on and on about how they used to have to purchase albums, “cassette player” is being phased out alongside other phrases past their prime such as “video jockey,” which was once used to define an attractive and/or annoying and/or annoying-yet-oddly-attractive person who introduced music videos on television, before there was such a thing as pregnant teenagers. Perhaps even more pertinent to our day-to-day operations here, the OED committee has also elected to kill the word “threequel,” presumably either because they just find it stupid, or because almost all movies these days require a minimum of two follow-ups, thus rendering the term redundant. [via Slate]
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