birth of a neologism

I've never read Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood, but recently I came across an extract from it and fell in love with one word - sidespies. Where has this expression been all my life? (Hiding in an unread book, obviously.)

Since I saw the word, I often want to use it, because it so exactly expresses a certain look that side glance doesn't even come close to defining.

But is it mine to use? If I were to use it in my own writing, would I be a plagiarist? When does a word become common property? When is a neologism available for use? Macquarie Online Dictionary defines a neologism:

noun 1. a new word or phrase:

2. the introduction or use of new words, or new senses of words.

By the way, Macquarie doesn't have sidespy, and neither did any online dictionary I looked at. The only place I came across an online reference to the word is on a thread at Wordreference.com.

We all use many words coined by Shakespeare. I think it's time to get Thomas' great little verb out into the general world.

Here's the extract I read:

        FIRST VOICE

In the blind-drawn dark dining-room of School House, dusty
and echoing as a dining-room in a vault, Mr and Mrs Pugh
are silent over cold grey cottage pie. Mr Pugh reads, as
he forks the shroud meat in, from Lives of the Great
Poisoners. He has bound a plain brown-paper cover round
the book. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up
at Mrs Pugh, poisons her with his eye, then goes on
reading. He underlines certain passages and smiles in
secret.

        MRS PUGH

Persons with manners do not read at table,

        FIRST VOICE

says Mrs Pugh. She swallows a digestive tablet as big as a
horse-pill, washing it down with clouded peasoup water.

                                                     [Pause

        MRS PUGH

Some persons were brought up in pigsties.

        MR PUGH

Pigs don't read at table, dear.

        FIRST VOICE

Bitterly she flicks dust from the broken cruet. It settles
on the pie in a thin gnat-rain.

        MR PUGH

Pigs can't read, my dear.

        MRS PUGH

I know one who can.

        FIRST VOICE

Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes, Mr Pugh
minces among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through
spinneys of murdering herbs, agony dancing in his
crucibles, and mixes especially for Mrs Pugh a venomous
porridge unknown to toxicologists which will scald and
viper through her until her ears fall off like figs, her
toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam comes
screaming out of her navel.

        MR PUGH

You know best, dear,

        FIRST VOICE

says Mr Pugh, and quick as a flash he ducks her in rat
soup.

        MRS PUGH

What's that book by your trough, Mr Pugh?

        MR PUGH

It's a theological work, my dear. Lives of the Great
Saints.

        FIRST VOICE

Mrs Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the
dining-vault.

Isn't it fantastic? I shiver just reading it.

If you want to read Under Milkwood, you can legally download it here for free.

why are they calling me ma'am?

What's going on? I thought this was Australia. Since when are women here addressed as ma'am? I've heard it twice in two days.

Urban dictionary defines ma'aming someone as using this term when the woman thinks she's too young to deserve it

to call a woman "ma'am," especially when she is (or thinks she is) way too young to be considered one.
(some twenty-something): oh my god, that waiter just ma'amed me.
(a friend): ha ha, you got ma'amed by a guy twice your age!

Well, that might be an American definition of this new verb, but my personal Australian definition of ma'aming someone - ie using the word inappropriately - is to use it anywhere, anytime, in Australia.

As far as I'm concerned ,
it's sexist,
it distances the speaker from the woman being so addressed,
and it's not Australian English.

The first occasion was when a guy came to our home to give us a special electric plug that's supposed to save energy by turning our television off standby.( And that's another story.) I felt that if he addressed me as ma'am one more time I would have to throw him out of my loungeroom. So I'm a woman. Does that mean I'm incapable of understanding technology? I can't put my finger on the reason why, but the word had a demoralising effect on me.

And the second occasion...

Today, an older lady, probably in her late seventies, tripped and fell down in a local nursery. Two young men looked after her, but I stayed to help, as it's good to have another woman with you when you've lying flat on your back in the middle of a busy area where trucks and cars are driving around you. The youngsters were kind, if a bit taken aback by having to care for the woman instead of hauling heavy bags of sand and mulch. They got her up on a chair, gave her a cup of tea, fed her a lolly for the sugar input.

And then they started to call her ma'am.

To me that was the point when they stood back from her psychologically. They had done all they could and she seemed okay to them and that moment of togetherness was past.

I hate the word ma'am and I'm going to challenge anyone who addresses me that way.

Like Senator Barbara Boxer did.

origin of the word 'boredom'

I was watching QI on television just now and Stephen Fry said Charles Dickens coined the word boredom.

Many sites on the internet agree that Dickens was the first to use this word in print, in his novel Bleak House, giving as the date 1852, but Language Log says the word was first used in print in 1864.

I hadn't realised that Dickens invented words, but of course it's obvious he would have, as all good writers try to find new ways to express their ideas. According to Words That Teem With Meaning; Copenhagen Views on Lexicography, Dickens did indeed invent (or use for the first time) lots of neologisms. Some, like gunpowderous, had a short life, but we still use allotment garden and casualty ward today.

A journal called Charles Dickens:Linguistic Innovator looks interesting and can be purchased online.

Update 6 June 2016. Thanks to a comment by Paul Vargas, I've learned that Dickens was not the first to use this word in print. I've made a new post to explain what he told me. 

Shakespeare overtaken in the neologism stakes by the Simpsons?

In The Age newspaper yesterday Ken Nguyen wrote about the perils of quoting from the Simpsons; he sets out a range of possible faux pas, the worst of which is 'to use any of the early seasons' self-consciously manufactured catchphrases' - Eat my shorts, for instance.

I won't be likely to make this faux pas, as I don't know any phrases from The Simpsons.

Not consciously, that is. But I may be more influenced by this television program than I realise. Nguyen refers to a comment by Mark Liberman of Language Log that The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture's greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions.'

Liberman originally mentioned the idea only in passing, but it's spreading around the Net.

Considering that The Simpsons has now been around for twenty years I guess it could have had a massive impact on our vocabulary, but I'd doubt it could equal the huge number of nelogisms attributed to Shakespeare. Here's a piece from The Washington Post that quotes from Harper's Weekly:

If you had lived in Shakespeare's time you might not have ranked him as the best of the London dramatists. In the April issue of Harper's, Jonathan Bate explores how Shakespeare emerged to become the most famous writer in the world, and how his works have endured all the changes in taste and political fashion over the past four centuries. I can't find a (free) link to the story online, so I'm going to type in a passage on Shakespeare's neologisms. It's not true, Bate writes, that Shakespeare coined more English words than anyone else. But his coinage was still impressive:

'He gave us such verbs as "puke," "torture," "misquote," "gossip," "swagger," "blanket" (PoorTom's "blanket my loins" in Lear), and "champion" (Macbeth's "champion me to the utterance"). He invented the nouns "critic," "mountaineer," "pageantry," and "eyeball"; the adjectives "fashionable," "unreal," "blood-stained," "deafening," "majestic," and "domineering"; the adverbs "instinctively" and "obsequiously" in the sense of "behaving in the appropriate way to render obsequies for the dead." Many of Shakespeare's coinages are not new words but old words in new contexts (such as the application of "manager" to the entertainment business, with Midsummer Night's Dream's "manager of mirth") or new compounds or old words wrested to new grammatical usage. Although twenty-first-century electronic databases diminish the extent of Shakespeare's actual coinages, they immeasurably enrich our sense of the astonishingly multivalent, polysemous quality of his language.'

a good nother idea

I'm still on the trail of the new word nother. Recently my sister said, 'That'll weigh a good nother kilo, I reckon'.

Okay... now I've heard a different word than whole inserted between an and other.

So now I think maybe our brains are processing the expression as one word rather than as a phrase. Maybe it's the word another with an infix in it.

When I looked up infix in the Merriam Webster online, I was surprised to discover it can be a transitive verb or an adjective as well as a noun. However, it seems as if we don't use infixes much in English compared to other languages.

a whole nother conversation

Still on the track of that elusive new word, nother, I found a trace of it today on the radio, on ABC 774, when Jon Faine, a presenter whom I respect, used it. He was talking to John Alexander, former tennis star, about Alexander's try for preselection in the electorate of Bennelong, and Faine said a particular topic (I forget what) was "a whole nother conversation".

As far as I can see, the new word only occurs with the word whole. Back in August I thought it would oust other, but I'm coming to the conclusion that it will come in as a new word alongside it, seeing it is only occurring as a phrase with whole.

friend is not such a new verb after all

I've just noticed a post on LanguageLog Grammarphobia Blog about the verb friend. The post cites a history for the verb friend going back to 1225!

I love reading LanguageLog. What a coincidence that it has a post on the very topic I'm interested in right now.

befriend or friend?

I posted about the new word friend, a verb meaning to make friends with someone on Facebook. (I don't think I've seen this word used as a verb on Facebook itself, though.)

I was wondering why we don't use the existing word, befriend, but perhaps befriend has too specific a meaning:

verb [ trans. ]
act as a friend to (someone) by offering help or support.

Maybe when we friend someone on Facebook we don't want to enter into the complexity of a relationship that places any demands on us; we don't want to have to help out or support the other person. After all, the new Facebook friend might be someone we haven't seen for twenty years, someone we don't intend to see in person in the next twenty.

new word 'friended' slides into everyday parlance

Chad Taylor wrote an article in The Age newspaper last week about turning his back on Facebook because it no longer serves his needs. He said,

I liked it at first. I joined and was quickly “friended” by an ex-colleague…

and…

I didn’t “friend” strangers or celebrities.

It’s a relatively new word, friended, so it seemed logical to me that Chad Taylor would place it in quotation marks. After all, he’s a word-smith, a novelist.

But the third time he used it in his article, he didn’t put quotation marks around it. He said,

…but one of her friends was an editor whom I friended…

And that seems logical to me also. You can’t go on forever placing quotes around a word. If it’s going to make its way in the world, it has to stand on its own.

So Chad Taylor’s one-page article seems to me a microcosm of the absorption of a new word into everyday English.

(I'd like to have put a link to the article but you have to pay to read it, so I didn't do so. Oh, the joy of old technologies - I have a hard-copy on my desk, and I can re-read it as many times as I like, for free.)

a whole nother new word

Watching an entertaining YouTube clip about teaching cane corso puppies to eat fish, I was struck by the words of the narrator, 'a whole nother fish'. As I've posted before, I think this word nother will win the race and oust other, just as apron has ousted napron.

one seraph is enough to sing about

Today I was listening to a beautiful rendition of 'Let the bright Seraphim' by Lesley Garrett and I thought seraphim would be a plural noun, based on the rules of the Hebrew language. But was the singular seraph?

Yes, my computer's dictionary said it was.

But it's a back-formation, a word formed by deleting the suffix from 'seraphim'. The Princeton WordNet explains a back-formation as 'a word invented (usually unwittingly by subtracting an affix) on the assumption that a familiar word derives from it.' For instance, the verb burgle came into use because of the mistaken assumption that burglar is a noun formed by adding the ar ending.

As William Safire said in the New York Times, "People do not consciously work out the backward step, but they have a sense that burgle is to burglar what sail is to sailor."

The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the first use of seraph to 1667, by Milton, and suggests he formed this singular noun by analogy with cherub/cherubim.

I guess Milton wouldn't have had much experience with Hebrew plurals used in English, as they're not common. Nowadays there are only a handful in use. Laurie Bauer, in the book Morphological Productivity, says there are probably only cherubim, seraphim, kibbutzim and goyim in regular use.

After considering all this information I was left with the question: what did people before 1667 call one of the seraphim?

Maybe they just didn't talk about them.

becoming a locavore

I discovered a new word just now, one that appeals to me on many levels: it was coined by women; it expresses a hopeful view of what we can do to avert climate catastrophe; and it quickly achieved inclusion in the New Oxford American dictionary. In fact, it was declared by Oxford University Press USA as the 2007 word of the Year.

The word is locavore and was invented recently by four women in San Francisco. It defines a person who tries to eat only food grown or produced within a radius of 100 miles. Such food is said to be more nutritious, to taste better, and to use less fuel in transportation.

I support the concept expressed in this new word, though I have read it can be better to transport food from a distance if it comes from a more environmentally efficient source than the local one.

Enthusiasm for the ultimate in local produce - my own garden - prompted me to browse the Net and I was researching this topic when I came across the word locavore on a site called Edible Garden.

A class at Bulleen Art and Garden last night has filled my head with plans to transform our garden into a rich harvest of vegetables and fruits. However, a little voice does whisper, 'Yes, but it has to rain!' (We've just had the driest September ever recorded.) On the other hand, there are also more classes promised, on the use of recycled water, so I guess I should stay hopeful. The teacher, Karen Sutherland, showed us photos of her own productive and beautiful garden.

I guess I'm not the only one full of hopeful plans, because I heard on the radio today that the growing of vegetables in the home garden has become hugely popular in the US, Britain and Australia.

naprons, neologisms and an elegance efficiency

On Radio National today a well-spoken man repeatedly said, 'And that's a whole nother issue.' He'd probably be surprised to listen to a replay of the program and hear his mangling of the word other.

Yet his accidental changing of a common word echoes a historic process. A woman tying an apron around her waist doesn't think about napkins or napery, because the n has migrated from the article to the noun and hidden the etymological relationship between the three words.

The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories tells the story of this word-evolution and also of the transformation of nadder(serpent) into adder.

When we speak it's often hard to distinguish the boundaries of words. My mother’s elderly friend invariably stopped eating before her plate was empty, wiped her lips neatly with a folded serviette and announced, ‘No more for me, thanks. I’ve already had an elegance efficiency.’ This idiosyncratic turn of phrase died with her, unfortunately.

phwoar, it's lubricious

I learned one... no, two... new words today. The Telegraph, in the UK, ran a story about the inclusion of phwoar in the Oxford English Dictionary of Modern Slang.

I pointed out the article to my sister and said I'd never heard the word, and she said, 'Of course you have. Phwoar!'

If it's an 'expression of enthusiastic or lubricious approval', then I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit it's new to me. Surely I've walked past a few building sites in my time. How come no-one wanted to lubriciously approve of me?

Lubricious - that's the other new word. My computer dictionary says, 'offensively displaying or intended to arouse sexual desire'.

Maybe I looked so elegantly poised the workers didn't want to impose on me by expressing their approval.

And if you'll believe that you'll believe anything.

The love of neologisms

Forty years ago I fell in love with a German.

A German word, that is.

The word was meinetwegen. Its silky syllables rolled off my tongue and I've been using it ever since. To me it means in my opinion. Today, my sister asked me which one of her fabric designs I preferred and I pointed to one and said, "That one - meinetwegen".

But here's the rub.

I just now looked it up in a German dictionary and discovered I'm using it incorrectly. So, do I have to stop using it? My family know what I mean, and they're the only ones who hear it.

Where do words get their meanings? I think it's by mutual agreement between speaker and listener, and that's why words can morph into new creatures - neologisms - over time. Take the example of the extraordinary change in the meaning of that all-purpose word, nice; it evolved from meaning foolish to denoting agreeable.

Words are all around us. They define the way we experience the world. I love discovering new words, whether they are accidents of history or deliberately coined. A visit to Word Spy, a 'site devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases' reveals the extent of change in our language.

I'm starting this blog to express my love of language. I'd love to hear from you if you share my passion.