pompatus not in OED

Jesse Sheidlower jester at PANIX.COM
Mon May 21 06:13:32 UTC 2007


On Sun, May 20, 2007 at 10:10:53PM -0400, Fred Shapiro wrote:
> On Sun, 20 May 2007, James Harbeck wrote:
>
> >I note that the OED does not have "pompatus".
>
> This is certainly shocking.  It will be interesting to see whether the
> following other pop-culture neologisms (Wikipedia's term) make the cut:
>
> sideboob (Family Guy)
> regifting (Seinfeld)

As far as I know _pompatus_ has absolutely no currency beyond
references to "The Joker". This is not the case with _regift,_
which was used widely before and after Seinfeld, nor, for that
matter, with _yadda yadda_, which has recently been added to
OED.

We don't particularly care whether something was coined in a
pop-culture source, we care whether it's being used.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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