Neologisms the Media has introduced us to
Yesterday, when I was looking up a new word (clone town) I had found in an article, I came across a very interesting website called WordSpy. Its author, Paul McFedries, collects promising new English words and phrases he finds on (mainly printed) media. You can, for example, find words like “prognostalgia”, “iceberg tweeting”, “undersnark” and “narcissocracy”.
Have you ever heard of these? No? Me neither! Nevertheless — or perhaps for exactly that reason — I consider them very interesting and valuable, as they can describe and/or depict certain situations way better than our “traditional” words can.
However, while I often find myself thinking: “Wow, this is really useful!”, I also sometimes think: “ Wow, do we really need this?”.
In order to explain my train of thought, I wrote a short fictional story:
When I woke up this morning I had this typical January feeling and therefore immediately got out of bed and went to work by bike rather than by car. After arriving there, I chose to take the stairs instead of the newly built escalator, too; there were too many escalefters anyway. As I tried to start working, I found myself multicrastinating again, though: I looked up one hellabyte of cute animal pictures and in addition, I watched a video about the guy-cry movie “The Green Mile”. While I thought about set-jetting, my colleague Bob — the fun sponge — covered in beardruff pestered me to continue working.
Did you get everything? If not, don’t worry, you can check the respective links.
In addition, did you like the story or would you rather have stuck to conventional words? Do you think that, for example, the word fun sponge is more accurate and comprehensible than its “traditional” equivalent spoilsport ? Should the English language adapt even further or should we try to preserve it?
In my opinion as a non-native speaker, the word fun sponge is very accurate and metaphorical, while the word spoilsport is accurate but less metaphorical. I couldn’t figure out the meaning of both words until I looked them up, so they are equally comprehensible to me. In terms of adaptation, I think that the wish to preserve a language is reasonable, but so is the wish to adapt it. In the end, it comes down to your personal preference. We are free to choose our words and as long as we can deliver our feelings and thoughts accordingly, it doesn’t matter which ones we pick.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, I hope you enjoyed it!
