The slow demise of the human race has hit an all time high in recent days with everyone getting up-in-arms over Miley Cyrus' twerking episode at the MTV's VMAs on Sunday night. Adding to that now, the Oxford English Dictionary has now entered 'twerking' to it's latest edition.

Katherine Connor Martin, of Oxford Dictionaries, says the word "twerk" has been used by U.S. Hip-Hop artist for more then 20 years and that the recent "outrage" to the raunchy dance move is no different to the "twist" from the 1960's.

The current public reaction to twerking is reminiscent in some ways of how the twisting craze was regarded in the early 1960s, when it was first popularised by Chubby Checker's song 'The Twist'.

Why was it added to their latest dictionary?

By last year, it had generated enough currency to be added to our new words watch list, and by this spring, we had enough evidence of usage frequency in a breadth of sources to consider adding it to our dictionaries of current English.

With that being said, on August 28th Morgan Freeman stopped by HLN (Headline News) and was asked to read the definition aloud on the program. Morgan explained to the host that it was the first time he had every heard of it.

 

[Digital Spy: Source 1, Source 2]

More From Q 105.7