Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success [Paperback]

And success has been mixed, not only for ADS honorees but for other new words (officially called 'neologisms'). For example, my own creations. I produced "oldveau riche" a dozen years ago, but seldom have opportunity to use it. Currently I'm struggling to popularize "e-dress," which is certainly more efficient than "e-mail address." The first ADS winner,
"bushlips" (for insincere political rhetoric), stemmed promisingly from President George W. Bush's "Read my lips: No new taxes," but, like Bush's promise, it went nowhere. "Frankenfood," a recent American coinage for
genetically modified food, is popular only in Britain. "Scofflaw," Metcalf says, was selected in 1923 from 25,000 contest entries. It's used for people who ignore parking tickets but was created specifically for illegal
drinkers during Prohibition, and it was thought to carry such a sting that it would shame them into reform. Fat chance!

Metcalf discusses other semi-successes. Gelett Burgess invented the very useful 'blurb' and 'bromide,' but their <meanings> were supplied by others. Lewis Carroll invented lots of neologisms that remain pleasing (e.g., "'twas brillig, and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe . . . .") but are so obscure no one uses them. The champion failure would seem to be Rich Hall, said to be a comedian, who in the 1980s
published several paperback books full of "sniglets"--words, he said, that don't exist but should. The examples cited by Metcalf show why they've all disappeared: They're desperate, useless and ruthlessly unfunny.

Shakespeare, Metcalf says, is the all-time champion. Words and usages he produced four centuries ago are still in common use; his instinct for the right word at the right time was uncanny. Not so mine. A couple of years ago I came up with 'three-wuh' in the hope of getting around 'www' which, as someone else had noted, is the only word to have three times as many
letters as it does syllables. Fat chance again: www itself has almost disappeared because, being at the head of <every> web address, no one needs to say it any more--or bothers to.

So, creative readers, buy this book and study it. Once you and your neologisms had almost no chance of success unless you wrote for newspapers and magazines. and were thus able to spread them around. But now you have the internet to spread the word, as it were. Use (and explain) your neologisms often in e-mails--which should be sent to everyone for whom you have an e-dress. Professor Metcalf included.

It is surprising that so many new words are created every day. You might even make a few yourself, like President Bush does; he comes up with words like "misunderestimate" rather frequently, but it isn't surprising that a lot of other people have come up with that one, all on their own, too. Often people perceive a need for a word and want to invent one to fill that need. This seldom works to make a lasting word. For a few decades we have been pondering replacements for "boyfriend" and "girlfriend," since older people are doing a lot of dating these days. It would be nice to have a word that meant "he or she" so that one wouldn't feel pressed to go for the ungendered but ungrammatical plural "they" as in "If anyone wishes to leave, they may do so now." As the millennium rolled over, we wondered if after leaving the nineties, we would be entering the "aughts" or "naughts" or "oh-ohs," but the decade still has no agreed-upon name, and maybe we will have to wait for the twenties for an easily namable decade. Words do not rush in to fill all gaps. But many of the new words here have surprising stories. "Scofflaw," though it sounds like something Shakespeare could have used, was invented in a contest in 1924. A member of the Anti-Saloon League offered a $200 prize for a word to mean "a lawless drinker, menace, scoffer, bad citizen, or whatnot." The word was widely publicized, and became immediately popular, although the original aim to deter such scofflaws seems to have failed.

Flashy words don't tend to last as well as the unobtrusive ones; in this way, an evolving language is something like an evolving jungle, with the fittest surviving. Since the American Dialect Society still is picking Words of the Year, Metcalf has proposed a rule that will more accurately predict a word's success. It is the word's FUDGE factor, an acronym of "Frequency of use" (popularity), "Unobtrusiveness" (seems like something we already know about), "Diversity of users and situations" (whether it is used by people in many different arenas), "Generation of other forms and meanings" (how fertile it is in creating derived forms), and "Endurance of the concept" (whether the thing it describes stays around so you need the word to describe it). This is all well and good, for a professional word prognosticator, but the rest of us can enjoy this new way of looking at our complex and amusing language, with many interesting examples, presented in an original book.

Metcalf presents a well-written, jargon-free analysis of his theories on this, including a historical perspective. I found it fascinating, and my copy has already started circulating amongst my coworkers.