So, ‘Yooper’ added to da dictionary, eh?
NEW YORK — Da Yoopers up dere in da U.P., Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, have hit it big with inclusion of their nickname in MerriamWebster’s Collegiate Dictionary and the company’s free online database.
The moniker for native or longtime residents of the Lake Superior region, who are known for their distinctive manner of speaking and Scandinavian roots, was among 150 new words announced yesterday by the Springfield, Mass., company.
But the entry for Yooper has a blooper.
“Yes, unfortunately, a ‘p’ is missing from the pronunciation,” Meghan Lunghi, a spokeswoman for the company, acknowledged by email.
“The rest of the entry is fine.”
The addition in the dictionary’s 11th edition has pleased Yoopers such as Steve Parks, the prosecutor in Delta County who has long pushed to have the word recognized in the dictionary.
“People up here, we really do have our own identity and our own culture,” Parks said.
But is Yooper as recognizable as, say, the Yankees of New England? Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer and editor at large for Merriam-Webster, insists that Yooper has crossed from regional to more general usage.
The Yooper culture has its own band, Da Yoopers, with parodies such as Smeltin’ USA. And Jeff Daniels has a high profile for his starring turn in Escanaba in da Moonlight, the 2001 film named for the Delta County seat.
Many of the other new words and terms stem from digital life and social media — spoiler alert, hashtag, selfie and tweep (a person’s Twitter followers). Others are fooddriven, including pho and turducken, a boneless chicken stuffed into a boneless duck stuffed into a boneless turkey.
Climate change and the environment didn’t go unnoticed — with the addition of fracking and cap and trade, a system that limits the amount of carbon emissions that companies can produce but allows them to buy extra emissions from others.
The new edition has been shipped to retailers.