Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - September 29, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba agassizfestival.comWorld-Class Cellists. Extraordinary Performances. One Unforgettable Festival. 28 OCT 01 NOV 2025 WINNIPEG, CANADA MONDAY SEPTEMBER 29, 2025 ● ARTS & LIFE EDITOR: JILL WILSON 204-697-7018 ● ARTS@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM ARTS ● LIFE SECTION C CONNECT WITH THE BEST ARTS AND LIFE COVERAGE IN MANITOBA ▼ Merriam-Webster adds more than 5,000 words to dictionary NEW YORK — Word nerd alert: Merriam-Webster announced Thurs- day it has taken the rare step of fully revising and reimagining one of its most popular dictionaries with a fresh edition that adds more than 5,000 new words, including “petrichor,” “teraflop,” “dumbphone” and “ghost kitchen.” The 12th edition of the Merri- am-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary comes 22 years after the book’s last hard-copy update and amid declining sales for analog dictionaries overall, according to Circana BookScan. It will be released Nov. 18, with pre-orders now available. Petrichor, by the way, is a pleasant odor after a rainfall following a warm, dry period. Teraflop is a unit of mea- sure for calculating the speed of a com- puter. Dumbphones are just that, mobile devices we used before the smartphone revolution. And ghost kitchens, which came into their own during the pandem- ic, are commercial spaces for hire. Other additions include “cold brew,” “farm-to-table,” “rizz,” “dad bod,” “hard pass,” “adulting” and “cancel culture.” There’s also “beast mode,” “dashcam,” “doomscroll,” “WFH” and “side-eye.” The new Collegiate also includes enhanced entries for some top look- ups, and more than 20,000 new usage examples. All of the added words were already available on Merriam-Webster. com. How did they make room? The company removed two sections of the Collegiate’s 11th edition that had sparse biographical and geographical entries to make room for the new con- tent. Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president, told The Associated Press ahead of the announcement that people no longer use dictionaries to learn such things as the location of Kalamazoo or who Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was. For that, they reach for the internet. (It’s a city in southwest Michigan, for the eternally curious, and he’s a Russian composer who died in 1908.) Merriam-Webster also eliminated some obscure and antiquated words, including “enwheel,” meaning encircle. “We wanted to make the Collegiate more useful, a better design, more interesting. We wanted it to be more rewarding to browse, more fun to look through, and to really be practical for research, but also a beautiful book,” Barlow said. LEANNE ITALIE MERRIAM-WEBSTER Hard pass, cold brew and dad bod are a few of the new entries in the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. ● CONTINUED ON C3 HAMMING IT UP ONLINE O NE man’s attempt to pass off hamburgers as “steamed hams” has become another man’s mag- num opus. Winnipeg graphic designer Tyrone Deise has achieved YouTube fame for his creative renditions of an iconic Simpsons sketch in which principal Seymour Skinner hosts school superin- tendent Gary Chalmers for an unfor- gettable luncheon. The episode, which first aired in 1996, sees Skinner serving his boss fast food after his carefully prepared roast goes up in flames. Calf stretch- ing and alleged aurora borealis sight- ings ensue. Deise, 44, is a hobbyist filmmaker who grew up watching The Simpsons. After seeing the episode memed on- line, he decided to remake the steamed hams bit in the style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He submitted the silent, black-and-white Super 8 film to the local WNDX Festival of Moving Image and uploaded it to his YouTube channel (@TyroneDeise) in 2022, without a second thought. “Eleven months later it just random- ly blew up,” Deise says. The video, titled Steamed Hams but it’s a German Expressionist Film, garnered more than a million views, and thousands of comments praising Deise’s artful approach to an objective- ly silly concept. The positive reception inspired him to take the gag many steps further. Deise has uploaded 12 different steamed hams videos over the past three years, referencing everything from 1930s radio dramas to mobile game ads to shadow plays from the Ottoman Empire. Each video hits the main plot points of the source material — dubious directions, misheard menus, suspicious grill marks — with a wink and a twist. In a Seuss-ified version, Skinner and Chalmers are turned into Whos and their dialogue spun into rhyming cou- plets in a hardcover book that Deise painstakingly illustrated by hand. In an era when AI-generated art is becoming ubiquitous online, he makes a point of walking viewers through his process with behind-the-scenes videos. High production value and experimenting with new techniques are a big part of the appeal for the filmmaker, who has spent hundreds of hours on the project. “What makes it fun and challenging is always trying to dig deeper and find something fresh to do with it. It is still something I find extremely creatively rewarding,” Deise says. The story of a bumbling underling trying to impress his superior while things go awry also hasn’t gotten old, yet. “There’s something so ancient (about their dynamic), that’s why people con- nect with it and why it’s so endlessly remixable,” he says. That said, Deise may be finished “steaming the hams” — at least for now. Last weekend, he released what he describes as his swan song: a live-action, 45-minute parody of My Dinner with Andre, a dialogue-heavy 1981 film starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn. The YouTube video, Steamed Hams but it’s a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film, has already amassed more than 145,000 views and stars amateur local actors Reegan Bourgeois and Terrence Ferguson. “I didn’t anticipate that it would get the reaction that it has,” says Ferguson, who plays Superintendent Chalmers and who isn’t a big Simpsons watcher. Bourgeois, a longtime friend of Deise, has appeared in several videos as Skinner. “Tyrone goes all the way with his stuff, which is one of the reasons I wanted to be a part of it. There’s not gonna be any half measures here. He comes up with an idea, then it turns into a weekend having fun with a friend and making art,” Bourgeois says. While Deise has exhausted his list of steamed-hams ideas, he plans to continue making humorous videos but is mulling more serious topics, such as social commentary and anti-consum- erism. Whether they’ll be a hit with his tens of thousands of YouTube followers is beside the point. “If people do like them, then that’s great, but at the end of the day I’m making these videos to make myself and my friends laugh,” Deise says. eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com EVA WASNEY MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Tyrone Deise has gained a large YouTube following for his highly creative renditions, including a Dr. Suess-inspired version, of a classic Simpsons episode in which Principal Skinner serves Superintendent Chalmers ‘steamed hams.’ Left: Terrence Ferguson (left) as Gary Chalmers and Reegan Bourgeois as Seymour Skinner in Deise’s live-action, Simpsons-inspired parody of My Dinner with Andre. Simpsons scene inspires film treatments on YouTube YOUTUBE ;