Everyone’s been there. You’re just back from a day on the snow and you sit down with your friends and family for a nice game of Scrabble, then it all kicks off when they claim ‘McTwist’ doesn’t count.
Well, fear no more scrabble-shredders, for all your prayers – or at least the more mundane ones – have now been answered. ‘McTwist’ has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
That’s right, OxfordDictionaries.com has just been updated with hundreds of new words and phrases, and in amongst them are an abundance of snowboarding and skiing terms that grumps have previously used against us to claim we’re all bums.
For those who don’t know, the dictionary describes a McTwist as “an aerial manoeuvre in skateboarding and snowboarding ‘in which the boarder spins one and a half times while holding the edge of the board with one hand’”.
The description then goes on to note that “While it might be assumed that McTwist is in some way connected with McDonald’s (Mc-has been noted as a prefix indicating mass appeal or standardization with reference to the fast-food chain the 1980s), it is actually named after the American skateboarder Mike McGill, who invented the manoeuvre.”
So that’s that sorted then. And to think, all these years we’ve just thought that the commentators have been trying to order a McDonald’s whenever they yell out the word McTwist.
Accompanying the board trick in the eternal hub of acceptance that is the dictionary is snowboard discipline ‘boardercross’, ‘skimo’ – the combination of skiing and mountaineering – ‘superpipe’, and the best two of all, ‘pow’ and the adjective ‘bluebird’.
The latter joyous phrase is said to denote “a period of time characterised by sunny, cloudless weather after a night of snowfall”, and the example sentence “a week of bluebird skies”, is likely to get all you snow-lovers out there slightly aroused.
And there you have it. We just got turned on by the description of an adjective in the dictionary. Oxford Dictionaries, you kinky tease, good work all round. We’ll thank you again next time we play scrabble.
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