New Words for New Communications

Today, the term blogtificate came to me: the process of unloading one's unqualified opinions, unsupported by fact, into a blog because no one else wants to hear them.

That got me thinking that there must be plenty of others:

• imaway - (adj.) When you set your Internet messaging software to away status so people will stop bothering you as you try to get something done.


• blackberryed - (adj.) The state of having a Blackberry filed with so many emails that you will never be able to respond to all of them.


• iphoney - (n.) A technology poseur who purchases some trendy device but hasn't yet learned how to turn it on.

So what others can you think of? There are comments on this blog for a reason.

Definitions: Love and Marriage

Linguist Geoff Nunberg had a great piece about how political factions use dictionary definitions in taking their stances toward gay marriage. It's a great analysis, and one that transcends the specific topic. I found of particular interest the following:

A couple of months ago, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary made some long-overdue revisions in the definitions for a bunch of gender-related words. Before then, the dictionary's definition of girlfriend in the meaning of "sweetheart" read "a man's favorite female companion," which would have precluded lesbians from having girlfriends in the romantic sense. And the old definition of love read, "That feeling of attachment which is based upon difference of sex. . . and which is the normal basis of marriage." So both words were given new definitions that would cover their use to refer to same-sex relationships.[1]

This is hardly a matter of rampant political correctness, or of giving the words a new meaning. It isn't as if the English language has ever ruled out talking about lesbians having girlfriends, much less prevented Shakespeare from describing a romantic attachment between two men with the word love. It's just that when the definitions were written, those sorts of relationships were officially invisible.

Oh, what a great point. People use language to make themselves comfortable, and set definitions to try and form the world in the way they wished it was, and not in the way it actually is. To point to "traditional" definitions is really to point to traditional prejudices and recorded wishful thinking. What axe edges are the dictionary editors grinding? So what we get is a true example of "begging the question": people take a stance based on social norms, and then use definitions created by those norms as proof that the opinion is correct. Might as well say that infant mortality is normal and "the way things should be" because in the past there was lots of infant mortality.

Banned Words

I find it interesting how institutions carve out odd niches for themselves. Lake Superior State University in Michigan has an annual rite of banning words, even though there is no particular reason that it should be the decider of what might well be cast out from our common linguistic life. Apparently the school takes nominations from the public at large. So we have the general populace of the world - whose collective wisdom has included the ascendancy of McDonalds and the Spice Girls - deciding on the tastefulness of language. Oh, my.

Some of the suggested excisions certainly had me applauding. For years I've hated the term "wordsmithing," often used by a certain type of pompous individual who simultaneously won't use something as plain as writing, but casts an attitude that the activity is nothing more than cleaning up and rearranging what the person set down as a first draft. Perfect storm, too, should be gone, as all manners of situations become one.

On using author as a verb, there was a funny quote: "In one of former TV commentator Edwin Newman's books, he wonders if it would be correct to say that someone 'paintered' a picture?"

But banning waterboarding? It seems to me that if the word seems overused, what should go is the practice, not the language. And using Black Friday as a retailing term? It's been around for years - the problem is that now people pay attention to it, particularly when the people are reporters who are forced to create some kind of news on a holiday weekend.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year

The word is out - literally. Merriam-Webster had its annual world of the year contest, the winner apparently the result of popular consensus. The winner: w00t, an expression of joy with likely origins in the gaming community. It supposedly stands for "we owned the other team." The mix of numbers and letters is deliberate, not a typo, and belongs to the hacker lexicon called l33t - leet, or elite, speak.

Happy Samhain?

It's Halloween - All Hallows Eve, which is an interesting story of a word. To hallow is to make holy, as in to revere as holy, and the Catholic church was trying to turn an old Celtic rite to its own use, making the day after All Saints' Day. The end of October was a dark time for the Celts and, specifically, the Druids. This was the official end of summer and the night Samhain (pronounced SOW-in), when the dead walked the earth. It was supposed to be a time auspicious for foretelling the future. People would build large bonfires, sacrificing animals and crops, and they would dress in animal costumes.

The Romans ruled the Celts for hundreds of years, and traditions of the cultures intermingled. Romans has festivals for the dead in October as well, and also a day to honor the goddess of fruit and trees - hence bobbing for apples today. I haven't yet found where the handing out of candy (technically, buying off kids who would otherwise play a trick) started, though this sounds suspiciously like wassailing. And in Ireland, there is still a tradition of the barmbrack, a cake with a plain ring baked in, which sounds like a Gateau Roi (King's Cake), but in this case, the person who gets the ring is supposed to find his or her true love the coming year. Talk about pressure for a pre-teen.

The Little Difference a Word Makes

Sometimes lawmakers find that one little word can make all the difference in the impact of a legislative action. Back in May, I mentioned how a Missouri state senator, taking the advice of a home-schooled high schooler, used the word "tocology" in a bill to legalize midwifery without other legislators being the wiser at the time. Now we have another example of an Arkansas law with unintended consequences, as the Associated Press notes:

The law, which took effect July 31, was intended to establish 18 as the minimum age to marry while also allowing pregnant minors to marry with parental consent. An extraneous "not" in the bill, however, allows anyone who is not pregnant to marry at any age with if the parents allow it.

A single word can make or break days, weeks, and months of research, drafting, and negotiation. Look at the current brouhaha about the House resolution stating that the Ottoman Empire's killing of 1.5 million Armenians was genocide. The Turks are in an outrage, according to AFP, the government there calling it "irresponsible" and adding:

It is unacceptable that the Turkish nation should be accused of a crime that it never committed in its history.

Of course not. However, let's put that aside for the moment and look at the House's use of the word genocide. It might be nothing but home politics, to court the Armenian-American vote. But what else might it be? As the Bush administration keeps pointing out, to pass the resolution might antagonize the Turks, who could retaliate by not allowing the US to use its air space and facilities to run the vast majority of the supply line for the war in Iraq. Perhaps that's the intent. If you can't supply troops, you can't keep them in place. Maybe this is the House pitting the power of the word genocide against the power of a word Bush has come recently to appreciate: no.

Merriam-Webster Rolls Out New Words

Merriam-Webster is ready to add about 100 new words to its eleventh edition Collegiate Dictionary. A number - like the Korean chaebol for a family-controlled large company, the filled Italian pasta agnolotti, India's Bollywood region, and the Latin-American soap operas called telenovelas - are American adoptions of foreign terms. But there are some unusual other ones:

• crunk - a style of Southern rap music featuring repetitive chants and rapid dance rhythms


• microgreen - a shoot of a standard salad plant (We used to call this a piece.)


• viewshed - the natural environment that is visible from one or more viewing points (What ever happened to the word view?)


• smackdown - the act of knocking down or bringing down an opponent (from professional wrestling, when defeating someone isn't enough).

I don't think a few words show a trend, but it is interesting how as a culture we do seem enamored of coming up with newer, shinier, more complex names for things that are already named. Maybe the plain experience of life isn't enough as we've become part of the grand marketing that is global society.

Teenager Uses Language to Help Pass Midwifery Bill

John Loudon, a Republican state senator in Missouri, had been trying to no avail to get the state's legislator to pass a bill legalizing midwifery. So he added an amendment to a health insurance package that avoided the term that alerted other legislators and instead used the word tocological, which means having to do with tocology, the science of childbirth, whether in the form of obstretics or midwifery.

Loudon told a reporter that a child of a midwifery advocate had uncovered the term in an ACT test prep guide.

However, according to the AWAD (A Word A Day) mailing list, a formerly home-schooled young woman named Sarah Greek, who just graduated from high school, receives the AWAD mailings of interesting words. On May 20, the list had mentioned the story. She came forward and said that she was the young woman who had remembered the term and informed the senator. With a vocabulary like that, clearly there will be no pregnant pauses in her discussions.

Web Site Review: Wordsmith.org

This is a must stop for word junkies. Jeffrey Henning, a friend and creator of tools for creating your own language (and a spot worth going to in its own right), pointed me to the fun that is the A.Word.A.Day mailing list a good dozen years ago. The Wordsmith.org site lets you join the mailing list and offers a chat service, anagram server, and a project to donate books to libraries around the world. It's worth a stop.

Word Oddities Site

Just a short entry, as I'm trying to prepare for a phhotography workshop I'm to give this afternoon. Here's a site with an odd collection of word oddities. I particularly liked the page with words that could be touch-typed with only one hand, and I'm certainly glad the high school teacher I had in the subject apparently knew nothing of these.