Ah, the august Oxford English Dictionary (OED), grammatical gatekeeper to all that is proper and just in the world of the English language. The great thing about the tongue of Shakespeare, of course, is how it absorbs foreign words as they inextricably become part of the Empire–and, just this week, OED deemed bánh mì worthy of inclusion.
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“As the culinary appetites of the English-speaking world grow ever more
diverse, loan words referring to new cuisines are a perennial source of
new OED entries,” explains Katherine Connor Martin, senior editor of new words (how awesome a job is THAT?!) for the dictionary. Other foods such as California roll and doughnut hole made the cut–but let's save that for another post.
In the meanwhile, our only quibble: Wherefore are the diacritics, OED? It's “bánh mì,” not “banh mi”. . .
