FWIW, I couldn’t be bovvered to pack my budgie smugglers

AROUND 1,000 new words, acronyms and phrases have been added to the Oxford Dictionary in its latest quarterly update.

While past additions have included selfie, twerk and fat-shame, editors of the venerated word bible have outdone themselves this time, as bovver, budgie smugglers, and scooby snacks are now included, along with ROFL, TBH, and FWIW.

Budgie smugglers is an Australian phrase which became popular in the 1990s to refer to tight-fitting swimming trunks “so called because of the all-too noticeable appearance of a gentleman’s wedding tackle,” while deffo also makes it in from down under.

Other new entries include glamping (glamorous camping), listicle (an article on the Internet presented in the form of a numbered or bullet-pointed list), and sleeping with the fishes.

Jonathan Dent, senior assistant editor of the dictionary, wrote in a blog post: “One inescapable factor of modern life is our increasing reliance on computers and digital communications.

“A slew of initialisms associated with the social media, emails, texts, and other electronic means of communication are placed in their historical context for the first time in this update.

“Perhaps surprisingly, many of these abbreviations for common (and not so common) phrases predate the World Wide Web, with the Usenet newsgroup communities of the late 1980s and early 1990s providing most of our earliest citations.

“Among other initialisms are a range of different ways to indicate that you’re about to be AFK (away from the keyboard, first recorded in 1990) but hope to return shortly, including BRB ‘be right back,’ TTYL ‘talk to you later,’ ltr or l8r ‘later’ (all from 1988), SYS (‘see you soon,’ 1993), and the more open-ended GTG (‘got to go,’ 1994).

“There are also various ways to indicate either that you’re ‘just kidding’ (JK, 1990) or that someone else has (deliberately or unwittingly) managed to get you ROFL (‘rolling on the floor laughing,’ 1989), including LMAO (‘laughing my ass off,’ 1990) and the more emphatic (and profane) LMFAO (1993).”