Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: “The Hidden History of Coined Words”

For the Visual Thesaurus this month, I reviewed a new book by Ralph Keyes, The Hidden History of Coined Words. (The publisher, Oxford University Press, sent me a review copy.)

I’ve been known to coin a few words myself, for business (as a name developer) and pleasure (as a lover of playful language). So it was a delight to discover the stories behind some famous madeupical words—googol, snark, discombobulate, robotics—and some not-so-famous duds.

 

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

Committees, you will probably not be surprised to learn, are not reliable laboratories for word-invention. But even brilliant solo practitioners have struck out more than they’ve homered. John Milton, the 17th-century poet, is credited with adding more than 600 words to the English language, including advantage, damp, fragrance, jubilant, and padlock; but he also had many nonstarters, such as opiniastrous (opinionated) and intervolve (to involve with one another). Roald Dahl invented many memorable terms, including Oompa Loompa and scrumdiddlyuptious, as well as many more forgettable ones, including chiddler (child), sogmire (quagmire), and frobscottle (“a fizzy drink whose bubbles fall rather than rise”).

“As prolific word coiners … routinely discover,” Keyes writes, “deliberately creating a new term in hopes that others will adopt it is generally an unfruitful way to refresh our language.” He quotes the linguist Barbara Wallraff: “We can make words up; we can love the words we make up; we can feel, well, that really nailed it; but we can't make them enter the language.”

Read the rest of my review of The Hidden History of Coined Words.

Name in the news: Kyndryl

Before I click on “Bad Names” as a blog-post category, I pause to reflect. Am I rushing to judgment, neglecting to account for the Zajonc effect, which tells us that repeated exposure to a name will soften an initially harsh reaction, and that we’ll eventually learn to love, or at least not hate, a name like Bonvoy? Am I mistaking my personal associations—what I like to call the “But That’s a Car Name!” response—for an objective evaluation? Am I punching down, sneering at a struggling little company’s attempt to sound smart or fancy?

Or do we in fact have a legitimate, inexcusable stinker on our hands—a tronc, a Mondelēz, a Nyoombl?

All of this was on my mind when I decided to write about Kyndryl—that’s Kyndryl, not Kindle—which is the name of IBM’s $19 billion managed-infrastructure spinoff. The name was announced on April 12; the creation of the new public company, to be headquartered in New York, will become final in late 2021.

 

Infrastructure-ish graphic via IBM.com

 

Word of the week: Ghost gun

On April 8, President Biden announced a series of measures he planned to take, independent of Congress, to limit gun violence in the US. Among those measures is a directive empowering the Justice Department to stop the spread of “ghost guns”—homemade firearms, assembled from kits, that lack serial numbers and are thus untraceable. “I want to see these kits treated as firearms under the Gun Control Act,” the president said.

As reporter Annie Karni wrote in a New York Times explainer: “There is no need to pass a background check to obtain the components of a ghost gun. They are sold online as D.I.Y. kits, and typically shipped as ‘80 percent receivers.’ That means the gun is 80 percent complete, and buyers have to assemble the final 20 percent themselves.”

 

Ghost guns vs. traceable guns: Illustration via Everytown for Gun Safety, an American nonprofit organization, created in 2013, that advocates for gun control and against gun violence. Everytown is financed largely by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Last last last last last call

I’d planned to do a roundup of books with identical titles, just to show you that copyright law doesn’t protect a title. (Some titles are protected by trademark, though. Consider the For Dummies and Chicken Soup for the Soul series.) I had Word by Word by Kory Stamper (2018) and Word by Word by Anne Lamott (2004); Great Expectations (1980) by Landon Y. Jones—popularizer of “Baby Boom”—and Great Expectations by that British guy (1861). The contemporary American author Elif Batuman has built her publishing career on titles intentionally borrowed from Dostoevsky: The Idiot, The Possessed

Next on my list was Last Call, the title of a true-crime book by Elon Green, published in March 2021, about a serial killer who preyed on gay men in 1990s New York.

And also the title of Daniel Okrent’s 2010 history of Prohibition. 

(Read my post about Okrent’s book, which was the basis of a Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series for PBS that originally aired in 2011.)

But that turned out not to be the last word on books titled Last Call. Far from it.

Here’s what I discovered.

Word of the week: TFG

“I’m tired of talking about Trump,” President Joe Biden said at a CNN town hall meeting in Milwaukee on February 16. “You had the former guy saying that, ‘Well, you know, we’re just going to open things up and that’s all we need to do.’ We said no, you’ve got to deal with the disease before you deal with getting the economy going.” 

“The former guy”—not “my predecessor,” not “the 45th president”—is the sort of expression we’ve come to expect from the current guy. Joe Biden is the guy, after all, who’s known for chump and malarkey and C’mon, man, and this is a big fucking deal—folksy, no-BS Joe from Scranton, PA. The former guy: as though he couldn’t be troubled to dredge up the name.

Within 24 hours, New York Times columnist Gail Collins had seized on the dismissive epithet. “I’ve got to say I loved it when Joe Biden described Donald Trump as ‘the former guy,’” she wrote on February 17:

This was at a CNN town hall, and Biden was pursuing his goal of changing the subject from … his predecessor. Part of the strategy seems to be avoiding his actual name.

Excellent agenda. Sitting in disgraced, double-impeached political purgatory, Trump has been trying to retrain the world to refer to him as “the 45th president” during his unwelcome retirement. (If you are lucky enough to get a mass email from him, the return address will be “45 office.”) How cool would it be if he had to sit in front of the TV listening to people talk about “the former guy?”

D.J.T. = T.F.G.

What’s its pronoun?

A new Amazon Original anthology series, Them, comes to Prime Video on April 9. If the title sounds familiar, it may be because you still have nightmares from the original (and unrelated) Them! (1954). Or maybe you’ve just been seeing a lot of pronouns in movie titles lately. What do they have in common? Horror, thrills, monsters, a dystopian present or future. In reverse chronological order: