An Instance of the aforementioned
Case study: Yesterday morning, in a response, Don coined a term.
Advertidity, his word, is the best thing I've heard since I started learning the words our ancestors made up but no one uses because they suck. That is, since I began studying for the GRE.
Example: "Volubility"
Do we really need another word that means basically the same as Prolixity, Loquacity and Garrulity? Shouldn't just one of those syllabous and redundant words be enough for our meandering and bloated language?
Short answers: no and yes.
We need to trim the fat. There's no need for so many unused words.
This act needn't be Orwellian, they needn't be stricken from dictionaries, a simple "archaic" in italics before the definition will do. Then future generations can look back and see how silly we were to have so many words that really meant nothing.
Follow up: This will leave plenty of room for words like Advertidity. Words with chops and tactile appeal. Words that speak to contemporary crises and phenomena. Words that say, "I'm new," and mean it.
Don't come with that it's ta bolster your vocabulary nonsense. You want to make a comment and you want to make sure everyone you're talking/writing to understands what you mean, you call something wordy. Maybe verbose. Maybe.
See, Verbose sounds good. There's something viscerally pleasing about it, something lush and brief. It flows but doesn't waste your time. Volubility sounds like science jargon, like I should be mixing two unstable chemicals while saying it. Or calibrating a triple-beam-balance.
Any word that requires vocabulary bolstering isn't worth knowing.
If the point of language is communication, and communication requires understanding, then these words are not really language because no one understands them. Had they a real purpose once? Maybe, but now these poor mish-mashings of alphabetic symbols exist only as ornaments of intellectual preening and tools for academic culling.
Put that in your Computer Adaptive Test and
Wreak havoc / Beep beep it's mad traffic / Sleek and lavish /People speak and leak it to the maverick
posted by Luke @ 9:10 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Don't forget about this sweet baby: sesquipedalian
-ben
Cognitive Psychology was my field... far too long ago I lament... about to become my field again, HURRAY!
One of the things about Behavior Analysis and Cognitive Psychology, especially those smart little neuroscientists, was that excessive terminology and latin wordiness was dispensed with. Hell the field is tricky enough without impressing everyone that you can speak latin or come up with a word that nobody uses which describes something common.
I'm not anti-intellectual -- but one could argue that excessive coinage on words is.
Case in point: I grew up surrounded by psychologists and the special breed called psychoanalysts. The pop variety and even the somewhat serious psychologists are enamored with their profressional ability to coin words that never existed before. They can do it because they can, by god or rights or whatever.
I remember creating an entire list, as a gradeschool child, of all the made-up words I'd heard one particular psychoanalyst use. I knew the guy, in person, and these words were from 'everyday discourse' you might say.
My favorite, haunting me to this day, was a word he made in honor of his German heritage: funkelnagelneu. The words means, literally, sparkly new nail -- or more specifically it is colloquial for 'galvanized nail'. Interestingly, nagelneu means 'brand new' in German as well.
Anyway, this guy cops a German word to use to describe a psychological concept. He meant to say, "someone has weathered adversity and survived, stronger" -- but instead he just said "he has funkelnagelneu". At which point he would have to launch into this big talk about how he came up with such a spectacular word.
Now, as entertaining as it was, I believe that clarity must come first in serious discussion. Otherwise I think you're either being lubricious or self-convivial (tricky or self-amusing, respectively).
Luke, you should really check out a book called "The Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson - it's a casual (but fascinating) look at the history of English, with lots of great words we don't use anymore and more mediocre ones that have slipped through. Bryson has the same, er, taste for words you do - he knows the difference between the meaty ones that sound useful and interesting and the ones that are useless and dull.
--Aleah
Sausage,
I'm a big fan of German methodology when creating words. That is taking three or more normal words and, through a process I call compoundification, try to make a little of each word shine through.
That's basically how Germans get new words, they combine old ones. Very Hegelian.
What's stupid, though, is, if you're going to do this--try to impose a word on a body of speakers, you have to make sure that word derives from the language they speak
To do otherwise is just stupid[er, when there was probably no need to make up a word at all].
Aleah, that's the second time I've heard of this book.
Either you've suggested it twice, or someone else thinks I should read it too.
I think I just might.
Luke. Ben. Everyone.
Looking back on my aforementioned comment, then, apparently ... I ... am ...
obsequiousesquipedalian.
How does it ALWAYS turn out that way!?
One problem with what's being discussed where: without big words, how are intellectuals supposed to display how much better thay are than everyone else? ...tweed plummage?
"Wza-y'ei is a word for the negative conceptual spacve left surrounding a positive concept, the class of things, larger than thought, being what thought excludes.
Dho-hna... a force which defines; lends significance to its receptacle as with the hand in the glove; wind in the mill-vanes; the guest or the tresspasser crossng a threshold and giving it meaning.
Ur-syntax: the primal vocabulary giving form to those pre-conscious orderings wrung from a hot incoherence of stars, from our birthmuds pooled in the grandmother lagoon; a stark limited palete of earliest notions. Los colours. forgotten intensities."
-The Courtyard, Alan Moore's lively and cheerfully Lovecraftian examination of linguistics. i believe that he later went on to become a fantasy writer, just like Noam Chomsky!
-ben
"i believe that he later went on to become a fantasy writer, just like Noam Chomsky!"
If only Anne Coulter were more like you. She'd still be a bitch spouting things she doesn't care to back up, but at least she'd be funny.
When it comes to funny, there are no points for effort. In fact, that often loses you points.
So bravo, dear friend.
Being wrong has never read so well.
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