The Rory Bremner of neologisms

As a newcomer to the dictionary business, I still have a wide-eyed fascination with where words come from and how their inclusion in the lexicon comes about. An avid basketball fan, I was reading an article on the NBA website, where an up-and-coming player was praised as being ‘telegenic’. I was pretty sure I knew what this meant, but I thought I’d better look it up just to be certain. Sure enough, the definition is ‘having a presence, appearance and manner suitable for television’. The etymology reveals that this is modelled on ‘photogenic’, which was fairly obvious, but I was interested by the wording ‘modelled on’. It struck me that this was quite a different approach from just using common affixes to alter the meaning of words. By that method, with the traditional meaning of the prefix tele- being ‘far, distant, over a distance’, one might come to the somewhat different conclusion that this young basketball player only looked good from afar.

I wondered if this was a common technique for producing new words and thankfully, Chambers Reference Online came to the rescue, by allowing me to search for all cases where ‘modelled on’ appears in the etymology field. Perhaps this could help solve a few ‘chicken and egg’ scenarios about the order in which words appeared. For example, when asked ‘Which came first, the gremlin or the goblin?’, I can now emphatically answer ‘the goblin’. Unsurprisingly, developments in technology have produced a few notable examples, with viaduct building on aqueduct, video echoing audio, escalator leading to travolator and hi-fi producing both ‘lo-fi’ and ‘wi-fi’. Technophiles and early adopters have even been nicknamed the ‘digerati’, using this technique to bring literati into the 21st century.

It’s likely that the main perpetrators of such economical coinages are journalists. Who else could have formed Glaswegian from Norwegian, precycle from recycle and pescatarian from vegetarian? I was recently introduced to the concept of ‘snowclones’, defined by Language Log’s Geoff Pullman as ‘some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists’ – a veritable swiss-army knife of neologistic shortcuts. The most famous example is probably X is the new Y which was first popularised in the fashion industry with phrases like ‘gray is the new black’ but has now been used ad nauseum for a variety of purposes, for example ‘30 is the new 20’, ‘quiet is the new loud’, ‘knitting is the new yoga’ and so on. But my favourite snowclone has to be X is the Y of Z, a good example of which is the saying ‘Edinburgh is the Athens of the north’ (although a quick search reveals it’s not the only city to deem itself so). Language columnist Mark Peters extensively documents the latest and most creative occurrences of this phenomenon at his site The Rosa Parks of blogs, which provides many happy hours of distraction. Find out what’s been described as ‘the Tom Hanks of vegetables’, ‘the batman of feminism’ or ‘the Sean Connery of payment systems’!

It strikes me that these new words and phrases are somewhat like impressionists, inventive yet always paying homage to what’s gone before. In fact, to use a snowclone, you might say they’re like the Rory Bremner of neologisms.



David Wark

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Getting a word in

A while ago, Michael Quinion, writer and creator of the excellent site World Wide Words, contacted Chambers with a query he had received. His correspondent was curious to find out how you would go about getting a word you had coined into a dictionary.

A surprising number of people have contacted us with a similar query. Neologists can be passionate about the words they create and often view their inclusion in a major dictionary as the ultimate goal.

It is certainly not impossible to coin a word and live to see it entered into a dictionary – every word has started somewhere. However, we often repeat the caveat that we, like other dictionary publishers, don't include words until we have evidence that they have been used by a range of people over a reasonable period of time. No matter how cleverly conceived and logically constructed a word may be, it won't appear in a Chambers dictionary until we are satisfied it is in use.

Lexicographers' decisions on such matters are informed by statistics from corpora – large databases of real language use. At Chambers, we have the Chambers Harrap International Corpus (CHIC), a well-balanced and ever-growing corpus of nearly one billion words. With a little analysis, the citations in such a corpus can show how frequently a word is used and if it is restricted to a small group of users.

It follows that if people do find a coinage useful and start to repeat it, the number and spread of citations will increase and the word could eventually merit a place in the dictionary. So, if you are keen to see a word of your own making entered into a dictionary, you should use it as much as possible, encourage others to do so and, if you have the opportunity, use it in a context with a wider audience, for example a letter to a newspaper or a radio phone-in. Keep a record of when and where you have heard the word because, even with corpus evidence available, there is still room for lexicographers to exercise some personal judgement as to whether a word is likely to become firmly embedded in English. When you have enough evidence to prove that the word has established itself outside your own circle, send all your citations to your dictionary publisher of choice.

If your word makes the cut for the next edition of the dictionary, you can feel content in the knowledge that it has become part of the lexicon!

Mary O'Neill

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