Groovy is in, bootylicious may not last.

Byline: Matt Cooper The Register-Guard

"After a few rounds of Botox, the housewife with the SUV was looking positively bootylicious."

Botox? SUV? Bootylicious?

All three words - and 2,000 others - were recently added or revised in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Given the ever-changing landscape of the English language, however, it's anybody's guess how long they'll be in use.

Everybody knows what an SUV is, and Botox is a wrinkle-remover. The online Oxford dictionary defines "bootylicious," in one context, as: "(Said) of a woman, often with reference to the buttocks: sexually attractive, sexy; shapely."

"I have heard of that one - I guess it means delicious in a sexy way," said Rosemarie Ostler, 50, a free-lance writer in Eugene. "It's not a word I use. I'm a little old for 'bootylicious,' I think."

Ostler, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, chronicled dying words in a book she published last November titled "Dewdroppers, Waldos and Slackers: A Decade by Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the 20th Century."

In her experience, words are like clothes: Each generation chooses its own, and the generation that follows won't have anything to do with either.

"People pick up words when they're young, and they use them until they die - you've got people using slang from the '20s and the '50s and the '70s - but it doesn't get passed along," Ostler said. "Everybody has to invent their own."

That's why Ostler is fairly sure that one word she uses - "neat" - will not escape the lips of her young nieces and nephews, except, perhaps, in sarcasm.

Other words withstand the test of time: ` `Groovy' has been going since the '40s and it keeps coming back," Ostler said. "It became a kind of joke in the '70s, but apparently people use it over on campus just as a regular word."

Usage may come and go, but once a word makes the Oxford English Dictionary, it's there to stay, said Jesse Sheidlower, an editor for the dictionary (www.OED.com).

"The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical dictionary - there are terms that haven't been used in 600 years," Sheidlower said. "It is both a museum of things that are not used and things that are in use."

Scores of people around the globe help the dictionary stay abreast of new words simply by reading diverse publications and making submissions to editors.

New words may hail from subjects as diverse as war and food. In fact, the African-American community - and, in particular, hip-hop music - has been the driving force in American slang for most of the last century, Sheidlower said.

Hence, the Oxford English Dictionary now includes not just "bootylicious," but "def," "dis," "dope," "phat," "rap" and multiple iterations of "gangsta."

These and thousands of other new words and revisions go first to the online version of the dictionary because it's easier to update. The words will eventually join hardbound versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The point is, regardless of whether a word is slang or offensive or technical, it's included if widely used, Sheidlower said.

It's for that reason, perhaps, that he won't discuss new words that are under consideration but haven't made the cut.

One can assume that Sheidlower doesn't want to taint the process by introducing a word into usage. All he would say is, "There's no point talking about words we haven't decided about."

The Oxford dictionary's new words proved intriguing to a group of teens found playing Hacky Sack in a parking lot recently.

Eighteen-year-old Will Cornwell of Eugene and his friends don't use "bootylicious," but they offered suggestions for the dictionary such as "beaster," which means low-grade or bad.

Cornwell, who wears his hair long and listens to the driving rock band Nine Inch Nails, also confirmed the re-emergence of "groovy" - in a context in complete harmony with its historical usage by his long-haired predecessors.

"It means pretty much the same thing as cool," Cornwell said. "The same thing it used to mean."

LOOK IT UP

New definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (www.OED.com) include:

fluffer: A worker on a railway system employed to clear the track of refuse.

Othello: A type of full-bodied red wine from Cyprus or a proprietary name for a version of the two-player board game, Reversi.

anarcho-capitalism: A theory or ideology based on a belief in the freedom to own private property, a rejection of any form of governmental authority or intervention, and the upholding of the competitive free market as the main mechanism for social interaction.

decompress: To relieve or reduce pressure.

CAPTION(S):

INSIDE Columnist surrenders: James Kilpatrick tells us more about "bootylicious" in The Writer's Art / F7