You know you’ve made it when the Oxford English Dictionary gives you its linguistic stamp of approval. Last week, the editors of the OED announced the addition of a new definition of the word " Muggle " to the online-dictionary edition. While the OED already listed several pre-existing definitions for " muggle " — a 12th-century Kentish word for a tail (apparently on a fish or a man); a 16th-century term for a female sweetheart; and a 1930s word for a marijuana cigarette — the new definition comes from the Harry Potter books.

According to the esteemed word-watchers: " Muggle, n. In the fiction of J.K. Rowling: a person who possesses no magical powers. Hence in allusive and extended uses: a person who lacks a particular skill or skills, or who is regarded as inferior in some way. "

But there is something wrong here. It may be unseemly — or even pointless — to argue with the editors of the final arbiter of the English language, but their new definition of "Muggle " is incorrect. A Muggle — as every grade-school child in the US and Britain knows — is not just " a person who possesses no magical powers " (although that is true enough), but indeed is a human being whose steadfast, unthinking adherence to the ideology of normality makes him or her boring, unimaginative, backward, insensitive, and prone to violence and brutality.

In many ways " Muggle " is a synonym for " Babbitt " — " a member of the American middle class whose attachment to its business and social ideals is such as to make that person a model of narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction " — which, of course, came from Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt. But even this is not quite exact, for Muggles are worse than simply narrow-minded and self-satisfied: they are supremely mundane, wedded to their normalcy with a ferociousness that makes them, well, impaired and even non-life-affirming.

The reason the Harry Potter books are so popular with kids is that they reaffirm children’s perceptions of the adult world: being grown-up and " normal " isn’t fun. Perhaps it was a stretch for the OED people — who are charged with the Muggly job of reigning in and categorizing the endlessly wonderful, imaginative world of words — to go that one step further and admit that Muggles are, at heart, completely unlikable and unsavory people who thud through life, missing all its magic and mystery.