Not particularly welcome

The Oxford English Dictionary releases every three months some notes on the quarter’s updates to the online edition, consisting of the revisions to entries in one section of the alphabet and the new entries from across the alphabet.

The revised range published on 15 March covers the words from Prakrit to prim. It contains 2,693 entries (8,756 subsenses, including compounds, etc.). This brings the total number of main entries in the OED to 259,487 (containing 684,542 subsenses).

Of course, the OED’s aim is simply to record words which have come into use and it cannot exclude those which need not or should never have come into being, so the list of 288 new words and senses which were added last quarter makes rather depressing reading. Many of them originated in former colonial territories whose peoples are clearly misusing the lexical licence they acquired when we gave them their freedom. Few of the following can really be said to have enriched our language, because they are superfluous or they describe something we have no real need to know about, or are just silly; I think I could have lived quite happily without adding any of these to my vocabulary:

asswipe, n.
derogatory.
1. A foolish or contemptible person.
2. Toilet paper.

tighty-whities, n.
Men's snug-fitting white cotton underpants; briefs

bimbette, n
slang (derogatory)
A young woman or adolescent girl, esp. one regarded as sexually attractive but thought to lack intelligence or distinctive personality; a bimbo.

irritainment, n
humorous.
Broadcast material which is irritating yet still entertaining; irritating entertainment

leccy, n.
Brit. colloq.
Electricity, esp as commercially supplied

jaffle, n
Austral.
A toasted sandwich, typically sealed around the edges

toodles, int
U.S. colloq. (freq. humorous).
(=toodle-oo, int.)

pretzelled, pretzeled, adj
N. Amer. (orig. and chiefly U.S.).
Twisted, contorted, tangled