There is nothing cuter than a brand new baby word, just gurgling and wriggling in its crib. I ran into a new word the other day and got to thinking about new words. The Harvard medical news said that we live in an obesogenic environment. Isn't that a cute little way to say that many of us get fat from too many chances to eat too much food? The next week, they used the word "placebome", a combo of placebo and biome. They mean genetic markers for traits that make a person especially able to benefit from taking a placebo, a sugar or other inert pill that fakes being a powerful medicine of some kind. Placebos are quite powerful and often account for as much as 40% of the placebo group getting relief or cure. That drives drug companies crazy.
A while back we listened to Great Courses by both John McWhorter and Ann Curzan, professors of English and both interested in the birth and death of words. They have made it clear that words come and go. One example of word change: people who spoke English once pronounced the "ed" ending on verbs separately, as in "walk ed". Curzan read a letter from the 1700's asking a particular nobleman if he didn't think "walkt" and "talkt" were clear signs of the degradation of the language and society. (Both McWhorter and Curzan have TED talks.)
I suspect that technology meant to improve communication can misfire and create new terms. I read that "LOL" was entered by the language specialists into the Oxford English dictionary as a new word. I Googled "new English words" and got this list, parts of which might be X-rated.
We are living in an age of discovery, research, innovation, and scholarship and that means words. We are living in an age of new communication devices and that means aids and misfiring aids. When you mix humans and devices, you get errors. The iPad "Quicktype"supplies whole words as I type. I type "sup" and it guesses super, supper, supply. Tapping any of those words can insert the tapped word instantly into the message. This can lead "falutin" as in "high falutin" being 'flatulent". Enough of these goofs and something emerges as a new term.
Actual typos can also produce new words, some of which will live on and become part of regular usage. Words for sounds such "poof" can be typed as "poff", which might be the sound made by your higher class magician as he changes spinach into caviar. Words for our approximation of the sounds by animals such as "Bow-wow" and "Meow" are good candidates for rich errors.
"Globish" is one name used for English language used in places that have their own separate language but find it handy or useful to adapt or adopt parts of English, which is currently used in aviation and in many parts of the internet. So, we can expect new terms to creep in from non-English speakers modifying English their way.
It can be difficult to predict what words will grow into maturity and which will expire quickly.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
