You Too Can Coin a Word

What literate person hasn’t dreamed of creating a word that others adopt, thereby staking their claim to verbal posterity? This is far easier to dream about than do. Creating a neologism is hard. Getting others to adopt it is even harder. A gap in our vocabulary is the best precondition for a successful coinage. We need new words to help us discuss changing circumstances: technology, climate change, pandemics. Even when addressing verbal voids, neologisms must strike a chord, capture a widespread sensibility with a word or phrase, preferably one that’s vivid. Terseness helps, as does alliteration, and use of forceful letters such as b (bubble, bunk), k (ok, knockout), and z (sizzle, Zoom). Anyone who successfully creates new a word and gets it adopted can join Jefferson, Dickens, and Seuss in the annals of successful neology.

Word Wars

Pitched battles have long been fought between neology advocates and those who think we have enough words already. Centuries ago language purists such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift railed against the many new words they thought were defiling the English language. Britons and Americans subsequently squabbled fiercely over Americanisms, the neologisms that settlers began to create soon after they arrived in the New World (e.g., foothill, skunk, eel grass). Jefferson’s coinage belittle raised particular hackles in the mother country. Jefferson – a self- proclaimed “friend to neology” – joined John Adams, Noah Webster and others in defending the coinage-rich American version of English that they thought was integral to establishing a sense of independence from the mother country. Guardians of the King’s English in Great Britain considered this attitude impudent. Protecting their national franchise and sense of ethnic privilege proved to be integral to that guardianship.

Casual Coinage

Some terms go viral due more to enthusiasm on the part of consumers than determination by producers. Repurposed words such as Gen. Ben Butler’s contraband (referring to those who escaped enslavement), Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm, and Clayton Christensen’s disruption were introduced casually, with little anticipation of how popular – and influential – they would become. Containment was just one of 8,000 words in a 1947 article by diplomat George Kennan proposing that the Soviet Union’s expansionist ambitions be contained. Kennan hadn’t meant that word to be his article’s focus. Years later, he recalled choosing it “light-heartedly.” This casually chosen term ended up having an inordinate influence on world affairs, however. In the same sense disruption has had a major impact on management practices, paradigm and paradigm shift on scholarship (and language in general), and contraband on the course of the Civil War.

Van Winkle Words

Many coined words lie dormant for a time, a long time even, then – like Rip Van Winkle – re-appear when needed. Such “Van Winkle words” include serendipity, which languished for nearly two centuries after being coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, before twentieth-century developments in science and technology needed that word to describe discoveries-by-chance. Changing circumstances are the alarm clock of slumbering words, waking them up as demand for such terminology mounts: greenhouse effect, vegan, groupthink. Slangy terms such as cool, chill, hip and vibe that sound so contemporary routinely turn out to have a long historical provenance. So do muggle, hobbit, and grit. Once these terms do reappear, they are typically thought to have been coined recently. This exemplifies what linguist Arnold Zwicky calls the recency illusion, “the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent.”

Coined by Chance

Among the many of ways in which words are born, one seldom receives its due: happenstance. Sources of new words can be fluky. Many new words have resulted from misprints (derring do), befuddlement (decider), and mispronunciation (quark). Proust noted how many terms that French speakers took pride in pronouncing correctly resulted from “blunders made by Gaulish mouths, mispronouncing Latin and Saxon words.” Literary scholar Walter Redfern called such coinage-by-mishap blunderful. Linguists are keenly aware of the role mishaps can play in word creation. In Aspects of Language, Dwight Bolinger and Donald Sears discussed how often simple mistakes fertilize our lexicon. As in the natural world, such mistakes – typos, misspelling, mistranslation – have been a key source of evolutionary change.

Prankery

The history of word-coining is rich with cases of neologisms created as part of pranks that went on to become part of our lexicon. The surname of Washington Irving’s faux historian of New York, Diedrich Knickerbocker, inspired a nickname for New Yorkers, and, shortened, to a type of underwear: knickers. Miscegenation was the title of a hoax booklet produced by two Democrats during the 1864 election to falsely portray Abraham Lincoln as an advocate of intermarriage. Maury Maverick’s popular neologism gobbledygook was apparently a prank-coinage based on a slang term for fellatio. In some cases neologisms created as part of a strategic hoax caught on. The name of a military vehicle known as a tank grew out of an elaborate British ruse to conceal its development by calling this vehicle a “water tank.” Publishers of dictionaries sometimes included faux neologisms called mountweazels, or nihilartikels, to smoke out plagiarizers.

Coiner’s Remorse

Some who create new words later wish they hadn’t. They experience “coiner’s remorse.” Such penitents include Alan Greenspan (irrational exuberance), Trent Lott (nuclear option), Peter Drucker (profit center), and John Gyakum (bomb cyclone). Coinage regret is felt for a variety of reasons: coiners can develop reservations about their verbal offspring, terms they coined years earlier may no longer reflect their outlook, or the ways others use and misuse it is not to their liking. In that case coinage penitents don’t regret a term they created as much as its usage. As part of the process of semantic change, linguists assume that the meaning of coined words will diversify in ways never intended by their coiner. This is small consolation to those who introduced such terms, however. They’re far more likely to be perturbed than reassured by this inevitable process of definition diffusion.

Naming the Future

Futuristic writers like H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov have been an unusually fruitful source of new words needed for a changing world. Authors of science fiction imagine future societies with lots of conjured elements that need names. As contemporary life catches up with their imagined versions, we continually tap neologisms that have appeared in science fiction to name new phenomena. Terms such as robot, grok, karass, countdown, space cadet, test tube baby, pod person, Stepford, Cyberspace, and many more first appeared on the pages of futuristic fiction before joining the language as a whole.

Just Kidding

Many a new word has been coined in jest. Scientist was conjured as a facetious term for those engaged in scientific research. Indianapolis was a fanciful suggestion for the name of Indiana’s capital. Software was simply a play on hardware among early computer programmers. Whimsical coinage is especially common in the cybersphere where not just software but crowdsource, blog and blogosphere resulted from insider wisecracking. Playfulness is an ill-appreciated source of neologisms in general. The linguist Allen Walker Read cited “jubilance” as a primary motivation for word creation. The widespread adoption of neologisms that originated as bon mots, punch lines, and flippant remarks generally surprise their coiners as much as anyone. This is more true than ever in a world where language is continually fertilized by whimsical bloggers, wisecracking comedians, and sundry quipsters who are less intent on expanding our vocabulary than on being amusing.

Disputation

Those who have coined a word that others use, or think they have, are seldom shy about making that claim. Competing assertions are therefore common. Terms with multiple claims of coinage include gonzo, software, and fashionista. Since such terms typically were circulating on the street long before someone claimed authorship, their actual etymology is vague. A coinage that has never appeared in print, or can only be found in obscure publications, is particularly susceptible to assertions of authorship by more than one person. That’s why someone’s claim to have invented a word is an unreliable source of etymology. It’s common to read that X word was coined by Y person, when in fact that word was either invented by someone else, or was already being used orally at the time it appeared in print. This is one of many reasons that determining original word authorship is so problematic.