On Cromulence
The English language is a fluid thing. Hell, all language is a fluid thing. There is no inherent truth to the words we use; they only mean what we say they mean because there is an agreement among speakers of the language to identify a particular sequence of letters or sounds with some objects in the world. I am very interested in this agreement.
The world 'out there' that words describe is infinite, or at least much bigger than the words we have available. Pick up a dictionary - that may be a very long list of words, but there's still more out there than that. There is a difference between an idea expressed as a phrase and an idea expressed as a word. I don't know where it comes from in our cognitive faculties, but I believe that we treat the two things differently.
This issue arises when philosophers or economists or whomever is trying to describe a concept for which there is no word yet. He is often forced to use a metaphor, which may or may not click with his readers. For example, for Thomas Friedman says that the world is flat in his latest book, he doesn't mean literally flat. He's referring to a much more complicated process of interconnectivity through technology between countries which he describes as "flattening." He chose to do this because he considered the associations with the phrase "the world is flat" and deliberately went against them, thinking (quite correctly) that a potential reader would be intrigued by the statement and want to see what Friedman actually meant.
Friedman turned a common linguistic hurdle into an advantage, since using pre-existing words in new ways means that one must acknowledge all the associations and baggage that the word happens to have already. For example, when using the word 'libertarian' one must clarify whether one means the political party or the philosophical position supporting the existence of free will. The two are absolutely distinct (though not mutually exclusive) even though the same word is used.
Gloria Anzuldua, a chicana lesbian-feminist poet, tried to dodge these pitfalls when she coined the word 'nepantilism,' from an Aztec word, to mean a struggle of being torn between two ways. It was an interesting attempt, but the word never caught on, and yields a mere 28 google hits, which is far worse than many misspellings.
Another attempt to coin a new word was made by Edward A. Ross in a 1907 work titled "Sin and Society." In this case, he attempted to define what we would now define white-collar criminals, a group of people that didn't really have their own term at that point, as criminaloids. This word enjoyed slightly more success, being printed in an Encyclopedia of White Collar and Corporate Crime at some point, but it still only produces 234 results in google.
The words boycott and spoonerism are both new words from the past two hundred years which were originally the names of individuals. What is interesting, however, is that there is another word which means spoonerism but predates it in the OED which has fallen out of favor: marrowsky. Why did one survive and not the other? It should be noted that it is common to turn notable people's names into advectives, if only when discussing their particular work. Shakespearean, Brechtian, Hegelian, Kantian, even Phildickian (in reference to Phillip K. Dick) all mean 'of (the person in question).' It is much rarer to see a person's name associated with an interesting but not definitive activity, as is the case with boycott and spoonerism, or sandwich for that matter. Of course, the process is somewhat common in the sciences, when someone discovers something else it is often named after them. You would be hard-pressed to call a boycott, a spoonerism, or a sandwich a scientific discovery, however.
Moving from eponyms to new words in general, why do some words stick and not others? There is some property among neologisms which some have and some don't, which is that they sound like they ought to be words. Spoonerism has it, marrowsky doesn't. Gremlin has more of it than fubar, and is therefore a better known word. Ironically, there is no word for this property.
I think there should be. (I think there are lots of ideas that should have words, but that's an issue to be explored later) But the selection of such a word should be carefully considered. When attempting to define a word that means 'sounds like it should be a word,' I need to make absolutely certain that is sounds like it should be a word.
My own capabilities as a wordsmith fall spectacularly short of this difficult task. However, I did happen to stumble up a solution, thanks to the television show which devoured a significant chunk of my childhood: The Simpsons. At one point in the series, the following exchange occurs between two characters on the show.
"I never heard the embiggens before I came to Springfield."
"I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word."
The joke being, obviously, that neither embiggens nor cromulent are words. Since then, cromulent has became a slang word among Simpsons fans, much like term 'grok' among Robert Heinlein fans. The meaning is relatively clear from the context - cromulent means something the lines of 'acceptable' or 'legitimate.' Some people wrap the joke in the show into the word and use it ironically, but that's a layer of meaning too many in my book. It'll never take.
However, if you take cromulent by itself to mean acceptable, then it sounds like it ought to mean just that. Of course! What better word to use to refer to the acceptability of neologisms, than a neologism itself?
I say that cromulent should mean acceptable in a general sense, but more specifically the acceptability of a newly coined word or phrase, or the quality of sounding like it ought to be a word. As in, "Gloria Anzuldua's word 'nepantilism' is not very cromulent." Or "The word 'cromulent' has the property of cromulence."
This, I think, does service to the many Simpsons fans who used the phrase in casual conversation, attempting to make it a word through the principle of common usage, and it also gives a subtle nod to the creativity of the Simpsons writers and all the neologisms they've given us.
The only downside may be that the joke will be ruined, if cromulent actually becomes a word. But that, I believe, is a small price to pay.
The world 'out there' that words describe is infinite, or at least much bigger than the words we have available. Pick up a dictionary - that may be a very long list of words, but there's still more out there than that. There is a difference between an idea expressed as a phrase and an idea expressed as a word. I don't know where it comes from in our cognitive faculties, but I believe that we treat the two things differently.
This issue arises when philosophers or economists or whomever is trying to describe a concept for which there is no word yet. He is often forced to use a metaphor, which may or may not click with his readers. For example, for Thomas Friedman says that the world is flat in his latest book, he doesn't mean literally flat. He's referring to a much more complicated process of interconnectivity through technology between countries which he describes as "flattening." He chose to do this because he considered the associations with the phrase "the world is flat" and deliberately went against them, thinking (quite correctly) that a potential reader would be intrigued by the statement and want to see what Friedman actually meant.
Friedman turned a common linguistic hurdle into an advantage, since using pre-existing words in new ways means that one must acknowledge all the associations and baggage that the word happens to have already. For example, when using the word 'libertarian' one must clarify whether one means the political party or the philosophical position supporting the existence of free will. The two are absolutely distinct (though not mutually exclusive) even though the same word is used.
Gloria Anzuldua, a chicana lesbian-feminist poet, tried to dodge these pitfalls when she coined the word 'nepantilism,' from an Aztec word, to mean a struggle of being torn between two ways. It was an interesting attempt, but the word never caught on, and yields a mere 28 google hits, which is far worse than many misspellings.
Another attempt to coin a new word was made by Edward A. Ross in a 1907 work titled "Sin and Society." In this case, he attempted to define what we would now define white-collar criminals, a group of people that didn't really have their own term at that point, as criminaloids. This word enjoyed slightly more success, being printed in an Encyclopedia of White Collar and Corporate Crime at some point, but it still only produces 234 results in google.
The words boycott and spoonerism are both new words from the past two hundred years which were originally the names of individuals. What is interesting, however, is that there is another word which means spoonerism but predates it in the OED which has fallen out of favor: marrowsky. Why did one survive and not the other? It should be noted that it is common to turn notable people's names into advectives, if only when discussing their particular work. Shakespearean, Brechtian, Hegelian, Kantian, even Phildickian (in reference to Phillip K. Dick) all mean 'of (the person in question).' It is much rarer to see a person's name associated with an interesting but not definitive activity, as is the case with boycott and spoonerism, or sandwich for that matter. Of course, the process is somewhat common in the sciences, when someone discovers something else it is often named after them. You would be hard-pressed to call a boycott, a spoonerism, or a sandwich a scientific discovery, however.
Moving from eponyms to new words in general, why do some words stick and not others? There is some property among neologisms which some have and some don't, which is that they sound like they ought to be words. Spoonerism has it, marrowsky doesn't. Gremlin has more of it than fubar, and is therefore a better known word. Ironically, there is no word for this property.
I think there should be. (I think there are lots of ideas that should have words, but that's an issue to be explored later) But the selection of such a word should be carefully considered. When attempting to define a word that means 'sounds like it should be a word,' I need to make absolutely certain that is sounds like it should be a word.
My own capabilities as a wordsmith fall spectacularly short of this difficult task. However, I did happen to stumble up a solution, thanks to the television show which devoured a significant chunk of my childhood: The Simpsons. At one point in the series, the following exchange occurs between two characters on the show.
"I never heard the embiggens before I came to Springfield."
"I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word."
The joke being, obviously, that neither embiggens nor cromulent are words. Since then, cromulent has became a slang word among Simpsons fans, much like term 'grok' among Robert Heinlein fans. The meaning is relatively clear from the context - cromulent means something the lines of 'acceptable' or 'legitimate.' Some people wrap the joke in the show into the word and use it ironically, but that's a layer of meaning too many in my book. It'll never take.
However, if you take cromulent by itself to mean acceptable, then it sounds like it ought to mean just that. Of course! What better word to use to refer to the acceptability of neologisms, than a neologism itself?
I say that cromulent should mean acceptable in a general sense, but more specifically the acceptability of a newly coined word or phrase, or the quality of sounding like it ought to be a word. As in, "Gloria Anzuldua's word 'nepantilism' is not very cromulent." Or "The word 'cromulent' has the property of cromulence."
This, I think, does service to the many Simpsons fans who used the phrase in casual conversation, attempting to make it a word through the principle of common usage, and it also gives a subtle nod to the creativity of the Simpsons writers and all the neologisms they've given us.
The only downside may be that the joke will be ruined, if cromulent actually becomes a word. But that, I believe, is a small price to pay.
posted by Matthew at 4:38 PM
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