The Ways of the Word
A Whimsical Look at the Worrisome Loss of Our Language as We Know It
By Libby Ferguson
We’re a nation at a loss for words. Quite literally. With words living mere half-lives of their former marathon lifespans, I feel a word-loving maternal urge to protect and save every last one.
Has the time come for words to say goodbye to their halcyon days and accept that all they have to live for is a scant string of salad days?
Am I being a solivagant here? Am I getting myself in zugzwang? I’d rather be silver-tongued than to gorgonize, jargogle and leave you feeling beef-witted. Too many antiquated words to make a lick of sense? I bet our great-grandparents would have followed right along.
Just as a new one is being born, many more
are plunging into a word black hole.
As great-grandparents ourselves (potentially and far into the future), will we be able to get through to our prodigious progeny using the kind of words we use today?
Or will the only way to communicate with them go something like this: “LOL. M i j/w? M i n trbl? Iw2 ttu fyi vs 2 leav u SYH n feln STPD. OMG ttyl.”?
If this scare tactic is working on you, too, then join me at once in helping to save this vitally important human function from extinction! Histrionic? Maybe a titch. But a recent report revealed that words are dying at a rate faster than ever before — just as a new one is being born, many more are plunging into a word black hole.
A distinct tipping point has been identified in the life cycle of a new word — 30 to 50 years after its birth, we either invite it into our long-term lexicon or send it off for a long walk on a short pier. In other words, there’s a Darwinian battle for their survival that has your fingerprints all over it.
What beyond our customs and communication habits could be contributing to this accelerated attrition?
Some researchers speculate that the word birth-to-death life cycle marks the point when the major dictionary houses go through the process of approving or rejecting new word candidates they plan to feature in their latest editions.
In a new book on the topic, The New Science of the Birth and Death of Words, physicists Alexander Petersen and Joel Tenenbaum looked at the ebb and flow of word usage across various fields and found it to be a highly competitive environment. They wrote, “All these different words are battling it out against synonyms, variant spellings and related words.”
In other words, there’s a Darwinian battle for their survival
that has your fingerprints all over it.
There are other factors contributing to this unfortunate word lemmingism. Spell-checking programs and vigilant copy editors police much of the content we read online and off-line in books and periodicals, taming the broad and arbitrary language usage preferred by authors. To what effect? It speeds up the natural selection of some words and the demise of others.
Data from Google Books Ngram Viewer, an extensive “library” of virtually every book that’s gone to press since 1800, confirms that we’re putting history behind us more quickly. To illustrate, references to the year 1880 dropped by half in the 32 years after that date, while the shelf life of 1973 was a mere decade long.
While we’re on the subject of word attrition, let’s not ignore the truncated elephant in the room. As younger generations eschew the language of their parents in favor of a new shorthand, words that they were weaned on are no longer used or cultivated.
Texting and tweeting are effectively sucking the lifeblood out of our language. Many claim that texting is the demise of the written word as we’ve known it. LOL? NSF (not so fast)! Texting is more closely related to a spoken language and all its idiosyncrasies and complexities.
Humans started verbally communicating 80,000 years ago, whereas a “pen to paper” (or more likely “sharpened stone to cave wall”) approach took us another 75,000 years to figure out.
Dickens made up “butterfingers” and
“doormat” (of the not-so flattering variety).
Think about how we exchange information most efficiently. We blurt it out. Though often more expressive and effective as a communication tool, writing is slower and can be a bit of a production.
If you’ve read a white paper or legal document you know how excruciating wading through a long, formal narrative can be. With text writing, communication is economical, spontaneous and pretty much tracks at the same speed at which we speak.
Texting is intended to be read only once — it’s almost like talking. And, as with talking, conventions are quickly picked up and word meanings quickly change. Where “LOL” once meant “laughing out loud,” in a few short years it’s evolved into a greeting that signals a friendly exchange with or without accompanying witticisms.
In an effort to slow down this rapid cycling and reinvigorate word usage, I’m on a mission to “use my words” — the archaic, obscure, even the fussy — to keep them firmly planted in our inventory. And, since so many words are dying, why don’t we start a boom and raise the 8,500-a-year birthrate with a few new ones of our own.
Anyone can visit UrbanDictionary.com, enter a new word and definition for it, and watch the word trend and spark commentary. Oxford or Merriam-Webster it ain’t, but it does publish whatever you feel compelled to put out there.
Dictionary editors scour published materials
every day, monitoring which words are getting the most “play” time.
A recent personal favorite of mine is “botchagaloop: a dufus. A half-wit. A loser.” Used in a sentence: “She needs to have her head examined for dating that botchagaloop.”
In addition to making up new ones, we need to hang on to what we’ve got — the gems that color our imaginations and lovingly animate our literature.
Who could allow sparklers like “demure,” “dalliance” and “dulcet” to disappear into dead inventory? How could we possibly turn a blind eye to beauties like “mellifluous” and “serendipitous”?
Our literary greats are a great place to turn to for inspiration. Dickens made up “butterfingers” and “doormat” (of the not-so flattering variety). Shakespeare penned “eyesore.” A powerhouse from Milton’s Paradise Lost, “pandemonium,” is a great one to handily pluck from the hip pocket.
How does a word gain traction and officially stick? Dictionary editors scour the Internet and other published materials every day, monitoring which words are getting the most “play” time, how they’re being used and the many ways they’re being spelled. It’s a process called “reading and marking” and is just the beginning of a word’s journey to becoming official.
Of this string of Seussisms featuring Nerkle and Proo,
only “Nerd” took off with much hullabaloo.
Marked words get filed as a “citation” and are revisited regularly. If they grow in popularity by a healthy rate over a certain time frame, they make the cut and go on to launch their big debut.
How did the great surrealist and master of the nonsensical give life to new words? With his unique approach to language, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) used the fun of nonsense to deliver serious messages on topics like civil rights and environmental conservation. The doctor was able to make so much sense out of nonsense that 4-year-olds get him.
Did you know that Seuss coined one of our most oft-referenced words of the last half-century? In his book If I Ran the Zoo, he offered up a boredom-busting anecdote for animals deemed too dull. He wrote, “And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo, And bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, A NERKLE, a NERD, and SEERSUCKER, too!”
Of this string of Seussisms, featuring Nerkle and Proo, only “Nerd” took off with much hullabaloo. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the word “nerd” increased in usage 786 percent from 1980 to 2008.
Succeeding at getting made up words to stick in today’s lexicon and ultimately to land in the dictionary may not be written in the stars, but the spirit of contributing to the English language is a noble cause you can feel good about. If you find the story behind the origin of words as fascinating as I do, check out Authorisms: Words Wrought by Authors by Paul Dickson.
We make ’em up. We resurrect and even reinvent them. We conjoin and dissect them. And bastardize them too. Often we give them only a few years in the limelight, spilling from the mouths (and fingertips) of all of us who can’t get enough until we’ve had enough. “Awesome,” anyone?
Today’s a good day to get the last word in, or any word for that matter. Have fun with your words and fight to keep the good ones around. In other words, use ’em like you’re gonna lose ’em.
This post was fueled by the “This is Britton” Spotify playlist.
Libby Ferguson
Senior Copywriter
BMDG
Video/Photos: YouTube, Google’s NGram Viewer, Amazon, Shutterstock, wikia.com
