Mind your language | 30 January 2010

‘Kriek?’ shouted my husband.

‘Kriek?’ shouted my husband. ‘What do you mean, Kriek?’ He was only shouting because he was in the next room and couldn’t be bothered to get up. His question was a good one, for Kriek is one of the latest entries added to the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a far more interesting word than SMS, another new entry, but should it be there at all?

It is never easy to know which words should be in an English dictionary. When James Murray, first editor of the OED, was working on the letter A in the 1880s he decided not to include the word African, since it merely derived from a geographical proper name. But when the lexicographers got to Americanise, they realised it must be included, and with it American. African, having been missed, had to wait until 1933.

The ‘General Explanations’ in the OED include a little diagram like a starfish, with Common English in the middle, and legs radiating off with Scientific, Foreign, Dialectical, Slang and Technical terms. The further from the centre a word lies, on one of those legs, the less likely its inclusion.

Kriek is (I discover) a Belgian beer. So is it not foreign? But there were already entries for the Belgian beers lambic (from the Arabic alembic), gueuze and faro. So why not Kriek?

Kriek is the Dutch for the kind of cherries with which it is flavoured, and it derives from Latin prunum graecum, ‘Greek plum’. A more arresting etymology is attached to another new entry, coon-ass.

Now coon-ass, you might think, would, as slang, lie outside the core of Common English. But perhaps it is no slangier than its synonym Cajun (from Acadian). The origin of coon-ass is more or less offensive according to your sensitivity to racial or to scatological abuse.