Word on the street

It may have taken a while, but finally the word gullible has officially been declared dictionary worthy word!

Of course that’s not true at all but simply a juvenile attempt at humour, and it does act as a rather silly segue into my main point, which is that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has just announced its latest update of the lexis of the global lingua franca.

That’s right, a whole gamut, a farrago, an array of new words have been added to the English language. What Chaat! readers may be interested to know however,  is that chief among those is the term street food. The OED defines street food as:

prepared or cooked food sold by vendors in a street or other public location for immediate consumption.

With as much foodie foresight as ever, in the last issue of the magazine we at Chaat! dedicated a whole section to these delightful outdoor delicacies (the August/September issue of the magazine available now). The 6-page feature includes a number of delectable street food recipes from acclaimed chefs, as well as interviews with those in the know, such as guardian columnist, Richard Johnson, Indian author and cook, Mridula Baljekar and street food vendors Horn Ok Please. The feature celebrates the immediacy and vitality of this most exciting of way of cooking, and shows how a style which is very traditional can also be bang on trend.

Aside from street food, the other thing on the tip of people’s tongues this week is course Miley Cyrus’ outlandish performance at the MTV VMA awards. The former child star had everybody talking with her provocative performance at the annual music bash. Overstepping the mark just a little the raunchy performance saw a skin-colour-bikini-clad Miley dancing sexually and generally making the whole world squirm with discomfort. However, the show did strangely coincide with another of the OED's recent entries. During the performance, Miley entertained the crowd (and perhaps freaked out duet partner Robin Thicke a little) with a dance move known as twerking, which the OED defines as a:

dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance.

If you’d like to watch Miley’s strange and horrifying performance click the link below. But if you’re currently eating street food be careful, you may not be able to keep it down!

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/video/2013/aug/26/mtv-vma-miley-cyrus-criticism-video