Look That Up in Your Funk and Wagnalls!

Reading a New York Times review of ‘Desperate Housewives’, I did a double-take

when I saw it referred to, un-ironically and without inverted commas, as a
‘dramedy’.
A moment’s reflection led me to spot the combination of ‘drama’ and ‘comedy’.
‘Cute’, I thought, and not an ugly coinage. Whether it catches on and survives
longer than a week is another matter, though! If it gets picked up by a few
enthusiastic bloggers and virals out into the blogosphere, it has a good chance of
getting recorded and listed by the language-watchers out there, like Wordspy and
Wordsmith or even institutionalized by the professionals at the Oxford English
Dictionary [ OED updates ] who choose which words to add to the OED. Fiona
McPherson, a senior lexicographer says; “As a rule, a neologism needs five years
of solid evidence for admission to the canon. We need to be sure that a word has
established a reasonable amount of longevity. Some things do stick around that
you would never expect to stick around, and then other things, you think that will
definitely be around, and everybody talks about it for six months, and then. ...”
words fall into the dustbin of linguistic history.

Naturally, the whole business of observing and codifying the language as it

changes has been automated, and even the august tomes of OED3 are now
treeless. The latest edition is only available online and the raw material of
research is combed from the Web by a lexical spider or Web Crawler into the
Oxford English Corpus, a giant body of text that begins in 2000 and now contains
more than 1.5 billion words, from published material but also from Web sites,
Weblogs, chat rooms, fanzines, corporate home pages and radio transcripts. The
Corpus sends its home-built Web crawler out in search of text, raw material to
show how the language is really used, then researchers analyze and sift the
ephemeral from those words destined for survival.
The Internet makes it possible not just for new words to be coined but for
neologisms to spread like wildfire. It’s partly a matter of sheer intensity.
Cyberspace is an engine driving change in the language. Any word, because of the
interconnectedness of the English-speaking world, can spring from the
backwater. And there are still backwaters, but they have this instant connection
to ordinary, everyday discourse. Like the printing press, the telegraph and the
telephone before it, the Internet is transforming the language simply by
transmitting information differently. And what makes cyberspace different from
all previous information technologies is its intermixing of scales from the largest
to the smallest without prejudice, broadcasting to the millions, narrowcasting to
groups, instant messaging one to one.
Some new-sounding words are not so new. ‘Blurb’, the effusive description on the
back of a bestseller dates back to 1907. ‘Cutting edge’ for radically new was coined
in 1916 by H.G. Wells. ‘Teenagers’ didn’t exist before 1941. Neologisms can be
formed by committee: transistor, Bell Laboratories, 1948. But most arise through
spontaneous generation, organisms appearing in a Petri dish, like ‘blog’ (c. 1999).
A lot of neologisms are spur-of-the-moment creations, whether it’s for special
effect or to fill a gap. Words get invented because they are needed. If you have
ever wished there was a word for it, what ever you are trying to express, but the
word doesn’t seem to exist, then go for it! Make one up! If childish combinations
like “ginormous”, can make it into Merriam-Webster’s, then you might well give
birth to a new word all of your own, which you can promptly post at their
OpenDictionary .Hopefully you can come up with something more attractive and
necessary than ‘snerk’ [ a snob being a jerk], ‘retrolutionary’ [ person who uses
old ideas to revolutionize the present] , ‘theodicise’ [ to defend G-d’s omnipotence
in the face of inordinate evil ] ‘travelator’ [for moving walkway], or ‘vajayjay’
[ watch Oprah if you must know!] by Mark Heyne aka Medway