Twerking earns its place in the dictionary
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Twerking, the rump-busting up-and-down dance move long beloved of America’s hip-hop scene, has gone mainstream.
It’s now got an English dictionary entry to prove it — “Twerk, v. dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance.”
Britain’s Oxford Dictionaries said the rapid-fire gyrations employed by US pop starlet Miley Cyrus had become increasingly visible in the past 12 months.
Although Cyrus’s eye-popping moves at Monday’s MTV Video Music Awards may have been many viewers’ first introduction to the practice, the dictionary company’s Katherine Connor Martin said “twerking” was some two decades old.
“There are many theories about the origin of this word, and since it arose in oral use, we may never know the answer for sure,” she said.
“We think the most likely theory is that it is an alteration of work ... with dancers being encouraged to ‘work it.’ The ‘t’ could be a result of blending with another word such as twist or twitch.”
The dictionary’s quarterly update also includes such words and phrases as “selfie,” to describe smartphone self-portraits, and “digital detox” for time spent way from Facebook and Twitter.
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