Mike Agnes jokes that he's the hippest guy in his office because he wears a sport shirt to work. Regardless, the book he edits just gained street cred.

Also irritable bowel syndrome and macular degeneration. Not to mention WMD and Cipro, USB and touch screen.

How do you respond to a volume of such range and scope?

Sheesh.

It has that, too.

Agnes, editor in chief of Webster's New World College Dictionary, is not a language provocateur, but he oversaw the process that just added those italicized words and 55 others to the book's latest edition.

Provocateur, too.

Making the cut isn't easy. Two full- time researchers spend their working hours reading magazines, newspapers, journals, and fiction and non-fiction books to come up with 1,500 potential new words/terms each month. Agnes and his team of editors then decide which to include.

"As a rule of thumb we're looking for documentation over three years so they're unlikely to disappear overnight," said Agnes, the book's editor for 14 years. "We're reporting what happens in the outside world. If I see something last year and never again, there's no room for it in a 1,700-page dictionary.

The editors also consider breadth and the relative frequency of a word or phrase's use before it gets invited between the covers.

Ringtone didn't make this year's cut. Decompress ("in the sense of ridding oneself of tension"), TIVO and Google as verbs, and asiago cheese also remain on the watch list.

Regardless of how much money the book makes, there will be no bling bling.

Nothing from the font of abbreviation that is the text-messaging world, has made a case for inclusion.

"Let us hope not," said Agnes. "It's limited to a very circumscribed linguistic environment although it has spilled over into e-mail. It's rather startling to see adults using the shorthand of middle schoolers. It's too marginalized for college dictionaries to handle."

The text icon :-) did slide under the tag as a second definition of the new listing smiley face.

As for sheesh?

"It's been primarily spoken in the past but has started showing up a lot more in print. For those people generating language in print, they realized, 'We say this, we can use it in print.' That prompted us to add it," said Agnes.

The additions read like a shorthand table of contents to contemporary culture and world affairs, from Al Qaeda to blog, blowback, botox, chad, civil union, faith-based, Hezbollah, identity theft, paintball, partial-birth abortion, plug-and- play, SARS, Shiraz, Webcast and Xanax.

For all his attention to precision, Agnes doesn't count himself much of a fan of spelling bees.

"I'm somewhat skeptical of spelling bees. It's a modest skill, has nothing to do with meaning or correct usage," he said.

"You want your child to be able to spell well 98 percent of the time and be able to look it up in the dictionary two percent of the time. It's more useful to read good literature and encounter good words."

wolfm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5226