The American Scholar: Shouldn’t There Be a Word .. F./Flickr. By Barbara Wallraff. March 1, 2. 00. 6Imagine being the first person in the world ever to say anything. What fun it would be to fill a language with words: tree, dog, wolf, fire, husband, wife, kiddies. But putting names to things quickly gets complicated. For instance, if I call my husband husband, what should I call my friend’s husband? Just for the sake of argument, let’s say I name him a man. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's collections and programs are so extensive that the opening of one refurbished gallery shouldn't. Enter your details below to login. If you are an existing member of The Times and The Sunday Times enjoying the full benefits of thetimes.co.uk, then simply. So is my husband still only my husband, or is he, too, a man? Maybe he could go by both names. If we let him have more than one name, he can also be a father—and a hunter- gatherer. Let’s make up words for actions as well as for things: The tree grows new leaves. The dog runs—he runs away from the wolf and toward the fire. This pastime has possibilities. That isn’t really how languages developed, of course. But in the beginning there weren’t any words, and now, obviously, there are millions of them, in thousands of languages. Our own language, if we count all the terms in all the specialized jargons attached to English, has millions of words. Between prehistory and the present came a long period in which people who didn’t know a word for something usually had no way of finding out whether any such word already existed. Suppose you wanted to know a plant’s name—the name of a particular shrub that could be used medicinally as a sedative but could also be lethal in high doses. One major recipient of this largesse was the newspaper of the. 12 June 1990; The Times (London), 12. Read 'The 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time'. 10,000 Empire readers. Family Physician, Nutrition Researcher, New York Times Best-Selling Author. Top Throwback Hits of the 1990's-2000's part 3- https. Mix - Top 100 Throwback hits of the 1990's - 2000's YouTube; Songs We Forget (1990-00's). Many Elderly Women Live Alone in Poverty. A few hundred miles from Daisy's place. If you asked around and nobody knew what it was called, you’d have little choice but to make up a name. Why hemlock and not some other word? The Oxford English Dictionary says hemlock and its antecedents in Middle English and Old English are “of obscure origin: no cognate word is found in the other lang. His writing not only shows the richness the language had already achieved but also shows Shakespeare to have been a prolific word coiner. Besmirch, impede, rant, and wild- goose chase are a few of the more than 1,0. His coinages tend to be more a matter of tinkering or redefining than of plucking words out of thin air (or ayre, as he spelled the word in the phrase “into thin ayre,” in The Tempest). For instance, smirch was a verb before Shakespeare added the prefix be- to it. Impediment, derived from Latin, was in use in English for at least 2. Shakespeare came up with impede. But as scholars of Elizabethan English acknowledge, only a limited amount of writing survives from Shakespeare’s time apart from his own. Many of the words whose first recorded use appears in one of Shakespeare’s plays may have been familiar to writers or conversationalists of his day. It’s also possible that in conversation Shakespeare coined many more words than we know—but because he didn’t write them down, they’ve been lost to history. The English language kept swallowing up, digesting, and drawing energy from other languages’ words. As English grew, word lists of various kinds were compiled and circulated. Lists appeared in The Egerton Manuscript, from about 1. The Book of St. Albans, printed in 1. But the first comprehensive English dictionary, compiled by Nathan Bailey, was not published until 1. Samuel Johnson did a bit of cribbing from Bailey to create his famous dictionary of 1. Still, it took about another half century for the word to make its way into Johnson’s dictionary. In 1. 78. 3, a 2. Noah Webster began publishing The American Spelling Book, which sold more than a million copies annually for years—an astonishing number considering that in 1. United States Census, the nation’s total population was less than four million. Far from resting on his laurels, Webster kept working away until he had finished his masterwork, the two- volume American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1. After that, Americans as well as Britons had fewer excuses to invent words. Of course, coining words to meet real needs continued—and it continues today, particularly in specialized realms like medicine, technology, fashion, cooking, cartooning, and online games. Sometimes what constitutes a need for a term is subjective. Why do we need myocardial infarction when we already have heart attack? Physicians think we do. Why do we need bling- bling when we already have flashy jewelry? Movie stars and rap musicians think we do. New words coined to meet needs—objective or subjective, real or perceived—have been with us since the beginning. From the usual point of view, a new word is successful if it catches on—with a subculture or with everyone—and eventually finds its way into dictionaries. But the impulse to coin words runs so deep that we coin many more words than we really need, most of which will never catch on. These words are not failures; they’re pleasures. Coining words is like sex in that it’s necessary to our species—but rarely do people engage in it for the sake of keeping humankind going. We do it because it’s fun. Credit for being the first to neologize publicly on purpose, for no serious purpose, is usually given to two Englishmen, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, for their nonsense verse. Carroll (whose non–nom de plume was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) coined them all. In 1. 86. 7, Lear wrote, “The Owl and the Pussy- cat went to sea / In a beautiful pea- green boat, / . But what is such a thing? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is “a kind of fork used for pickles, etc., curved like a spoon and having three broad prongs of which one has a sharp edge.” But, the OED notes, “the illustrations provided by Lear himself for his books of verse give no warrant for this later interpretation.”Though many nonsense words might seem arbitrary—can you guess from looking at brillig or runcible what it means?—a number of Lewis Carroll’s coinages have a special property. Humpty Dumpty explains this to Alice a bit further on in Through the Looking Glass, when she asks for his help with the unfamiliar words in “Jabberwocky”: “! With this idea, Carroll bestowed a versatile gift on the world of recreational neologizing. Because portmanteau words are derived from dictionary words, they tend to be less opaque than other new coinages. In fact, chortle, another portmanteau word that Carroll coined in “Jabberwocky,” became a dictionary word because people readily understood how to use it. The Oxford English Dictionary explains chortle’s roots like this: “app. It’s probably time to hunt up a less anachronistic term to carry the meaning into the future. Literary figures from James Joyce (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnronntonn- erronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawn toohoohoordenenthurnuk!) and George Orwell (Newspeak) to J. Tolkien (hobbit) and J. Rowling (quidditch) have made up words the better to convey worlds largely of their invention. Recreational word coining, however, describes odd corners of the world we know. Recreational redefining is a related field, which also describes the world we know. Therefore, before we get acquainted with the first true recreational word coiner, who came a bit later, let’s meet the pioneer on this linguistic front—the American writer Ambrose Bierce. Bierce was a near contemporary of Carroll and Lear. In 1. 87. 5 he finished a freelance manuscript that included 4. English words and his redefinitions of them. This, the first sulfurous spark of what would become The Devil’s Dictionary, failed to set the world on fire. Six years later, Bierce was named editor of Wasp, a new satirical journal, and he immediately began writing and publishing a feature that offered “twisty new definitions of shopworn old words,” as Roy Morris Jr. Many of the words from Wasp also took their place among the 9. Bierce’s best- known book. An admiral, he wrote, is “that part of a war- ship which does the talking while the figure- head does the thinking.” A habit is “a shackle for the free.” Zeal is “a certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.” In 1. Bierce lit out for Mexico and disappeared off the face of the earth, he published 1. Collected Works, including The Devil’s Dictionary. Since then, the book has never been out of print. The first true recreational word coiner was another American: Gelett Burgess. Like Carroll and Lear in England, Burgess published nonsense verse—one of his claims to fame is the poem “The Purple Cow.” More to the point, in 1. Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed. Among the words in it is blurb—another of Burgess’s claims to fame, for this creation of his is still in use, with roughly the meaning he assigned it. Alas, few of his other words ever caught on—not without reason, as we shall see. After a decades- long pause, a spate of books featuring recreational word coining began to appear. For instance, An Exaltation of Larks, which in 1. James Lipton (now better known as the host of Inside the Actors Studio, on the Bravo channel), either coined himself or found in the work of contemporary writers: “a phalanx of flashers,” Kurt Vonnegut; “a mews of cathouses,” Neil Simon; “an om of Buddhists,” George Plimpton. The 1. 98. 3 book The Meaning of Liff and its 1. The Deeper Meaning of Liff, by the British writers Douglas Adams (author of the 1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and John Lloyd, merrily misappropriated geographic names from Aasleagh (“a liqueur made only for drinking at the end of a revoltingly long bottle party when all the drinkable drink has been drunk”) to Zeal Monachorum (“. Rich Hall, a writer and cast member on HBO’s comedy show Not Necessarily the News, came up with the idea of a sniglet as “any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should.” Sniglets fans sent Hall words like aquadextrous, “possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes,” and profanitype, “the special symbols used by cartoonists to replace swear words (points, asterisks, stars, and so on).” From 1. Next came a more serious and high- minded variation on the theme.
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