Podcast Bonus! The New Word Open Mic

Welcome to a special New Words edition of the A Way with Words summer podcast produced, this time with the help of Charles Hodson of podictionary.com.

I’m Grant Barrett.

In June, I attended the biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America, hosted this year on the campus of the University of Chicago. Among other things, we held what we call a New Word open mic. We invited anybody to step up to a microphone and tell us about a new word they’d coined or found. We’re going to share some of those words with you today.

I was honored to be one of the three panelists judging the open mic in something like American Idol fashion. Also on the panel was David Jost, the director of electronic publishing for Houghton Mifflin. They published the American Heritage Dictionary. David, believe it or not, did almost all their pronunciation examples. You can hear his mellifluous tones at Bartleby.com.

Also on the panel with us was Gwendolyn Nichols, editor of the copy editor newsletter and former editorial director of reference works at Random House. And emceeing the event with an endless supply of similes and metaphors was Erin McKean. She’s the chief consulting editor of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press and a compiler of three weird and wonderful word books. She also organized this year’s conference. You can find her on the internet at dictionaryevangelist.com.

Erin began by talking about the curious desire people have to get their particular word included in a dictionary, any dictionary. She tells us what dictionary editors look for when they audition new words. Occasionally when people ask me if I could put their word in the new Oxford American Dictionary and I said no, they said as if they were looking for a job, well is there any other dictionary to whom you can recommend me? And sometimes I’d think about it and I’d say well you know most if not all dictionaries of modern English, British or American are looking for the same things in a new word.

Because if only the words that appeal to lexicographers on an aesthetic level, on a level of humor, on a level of say just favorite letters of the alphabet were the ones that got in, dictionaries would be a whole lot shorter. What lexicographers are really looking for in new words are words that are useful. I have used this metaphor so many times that the edges are all bent and the corners rounded but when I describe modern dictionaries I describe them as toolboxes for readers and writers and the words in the dictionary are the tools that you’re using to understand what you’ve read and to create new expressions.

And a toolbox wouldn’t be very good if it were filled with say crystal object dart or just plain dirt picked up from the street. Neither of those things are useful either and so when you’re thinking of the words as tools, well-worn metaphor, the words that we want to see are words that we think are going to be useful and applicable to the general range of English writers and speakers. But we want to see words that if we put them in the dictionary will they help someone understand something or they help someone express something? And if they’re just there to look pretty they’re not going to get in there at all.

So often people have suggested words that are really, really beautiful or very, very funny but I cannot think of a utility for them at all. I was in New York a month or so ago and ran an event where people were encouraged to make up words as a fun kind of parlor game activity and much like this event people voted on what they thought the best new words created that day were. The number one word though that was voted as the most entertaining word made in that particular session was the word “crappyjack” and the definition for the word “crappyjack” was given as any kind of food that you eat that is bad for you.

So modeled on “crap” plus “crackerjack” basically. The next speaker came up. She was an 89-year-old Anglican nun. She was talking about the experience of spirituality. She managed to use the word “crappyjack” eight times in her talk. She picked it up immediately. She not only used it in I guess what was then its straight sense, food that is bad for you, anything you can buy in a crinkly package at a convenience store is by definition “crappyjack” and then she started talking about spiritual “crappyjack” and everybody was with her.

They had internalized meaning of “crappyjack” immediately so when she extended it to talk about spiritual “crappyjack” stuff that was, you know, you bought it for a quick spiritual fix and then the experience left you hollow and queasy. Choosing words to include isn’t the only time dictionary editors rely on intuition and foresight. Dropping words requires the same abilities. David Jost mentioned a case where it seemed like a good idea at the time.

You know sometimes we drop words from the dictionary and some of the words we drop are in fact words that were new at the time. So we had put in a bunch of surfing terms back when surfing was really more, you know, the beach boys were around and all that. And one of these words was “ho-dad”. It’s a surfer wannabe. Somebody who hangs around surfers but doesn’t surf and so I mentioned that to somebody in the next generation. He loved the word and the next thing I knew, he told me about this friend of his who was an Internet service provider had come out with all these ads saying, and you know we take it out of the dictionary, “Don’t be a ho-dad, surf the web.” Took it out too soon.

But the reason we were all gathered was to find new words which, as Erin pointed out, is what keeps lexicographers employed. You can hear panelists going over their notes as Erin explains that English can handle all the new words we throw at it. It is okay to make up a word because the English language encourages it. We have so many affixes, suffixes and prefixes and infixes and circumfixes, all kinds of fixes with which you can fix up words and make them into different words.

If you think of everyone in the English language as a house, they are all subject to renovation and addition. There are very few words that can’t be modified with the addition of a couple prefixes. You can stack them up. You can create new meanings from old ones. Not all languages are as fortunate as English in this regard and the fact that it can be done leads me to believe that it was intended to be done and that if we’re going to ascribe agency and animism to the English language, I think the English language wants it to be done.

With that rousing cheer from yours truly, we started the new word nominations. Gary Corrington offers up his first word for consideration. The word is invertebrate, I-N-V-E-R-T-I-B-R-A-T-S and it’s those people who engage in spineless misbehavior and the other one is ommergency, O-M-E-R-G-E-N-C-Y. That’s to be in a hurry to get in touch with the universe. Can I ask where these words came from? From your fertile brain? Yes. Excellent. That’s what we like. Yeah, good job. Fertile brain.

Now, as long as we got the mic here, you looked up invertebrates, right? Yeah, zero hits on invertebrate anywhere. Okay. Yay. Gary gets props for a brand spanking new coinage, then his wife took to the mic with a suggestion of her own. This word was an accidental coinage due to a brain spasm during a formal presentation and the word is commoditized or by extension commoditization, commoditized to make into a commodity, commoditization the process of becoming or making into a commodity.

And that’s a good word to bring up another interesting point in that some words that are not head words in the dictionary, not the words that you look up, go into the dictionary under say more basic forms. So commoditization would run on at commoditize because that is a regular pattern of English that verbs that end in i’s, the asians just stick to them. Anything that you can i’s, you can almost always asian. But if you know the word commoditize, then you can predict what commoditization means.

And so lexicographers who are always pressed for space as well as time will put those gimme words at the end of an entry and just trust that native speakers of English will figure it out. So you may already be a winner, commoditization may already be in several dictionaries and hold on I can check one for you real quick.

Erin, we did that.

Grant did it.

We just looked and actually commoditized in various conjugations of the verb appears at least six hundred and eighty one thousand times on Google and it also has.

A lot of people made the same mistake.

Yeah, well, as Wendy said, a lot of people made the same mistake, which is there’s already a perfectly good verb form of the noun commodity, which is commodify, which is in Merriam Webster’s American Heritage. And this is Simon and the Oxford Project. Yes, I am Simon Cowell, thank you very much. I am a son of a bitch.

Well, someone has to do it.

Having two words for what seemed like the same idea prompted Orion Montoya to consult the Oxford English corpus, a one point eight billion word database he manages for Oxford University Press. As he and Erin explain, there really is a difference in the way we use commodify and commoditize, so maybe the language does need them both.

In the Oxford English corpus, commoditize occurs one hundred and sixty nine times, most commonly with hardware and market as its object and increasingly and more as a modifier of it.

What about commodify?

The most salient object of commodify is dissent.

You commodify dissent? Yes, oh, that’s right. And then aspects culture though you commodify a woman and information. I personally don’t do that, which is I guess for first mostly to prostitution obviously and also to cultures of misogyny and exploitation. Which one is more frequent? Commodify is more frequent. Commoditize is gaining, I would say, because dissent and women as objects of becoming commodities, like the collocation behavior, is that commodify is more negative. Yes, and commoditize might be perceived as more positive. So what we find out from looking at the words other words hang out with is that commodify hangs out with a bad crowd and commoditize is more neutral or more commercially oriented. So that is probably a reason why people have started using commoditize and not commodify.

Our next nominator is Paul Heacock, a lexicographer and editor for Cambridge University Press.

He had more than one suggestion for the panel.

The two words are grabical and view vocal. A grabical is a cubicle without a view, without a window, an office cubicle, and a view vocal is, of course, the much desired office cubicle with a window. I can spell them. Grabical in American English would be G-R-A-Y-B-I-C-L-E or in British English G-R-E-Y-B-I-C-L-E. And a view vocal, I think just for spontaneity’s sake, would be better off as V-U-E-B-I-C-L-E. View vocal actually made it into the Wired’s word watch column. Erin actually planted it there on my behalf, but it didn’t seem to take off, so I’m trying once again on behalf of this former colleague.

And I’m sorry that V-U-B-I-C-L-E didn’t take off. I’m a huge fan of Wired Magazine and I read it all the time, but then I realized after proposing V-U-B-I-C-L-E for their new words column is that many of the people who read Wired work for large dot-com companies where they not only have cubicles with views, they get free lunch. So it’s not a marked thing that is, it’s not unusual to have a cubicle with a view, so they don’t need a word for it.

In English, we have lots of things that we don’t consider marked. We don’t really discuss, so we don’t have individual lexical items for them.

We don’t have a word for a shirt that’s missing one sleeve, right?

We don’t talk about that. That’s pretty much ridiculous. It’s not something that we talk about, so I think V-U-B-I-C-L-E lost out because all the people reading that magazine, they never have to talk about whether their cubicle has a view or not. It’s just assumed.

Well, I’d call a shirt with one sleeve a Kimball or a monobrachium or something. Send us your suggestions. Anyway, Paul isn’t done yet. He had a couple more things to get off his chest.

One of the themes of this conference seems to have been Paris Hilton, and it’s not an overt theme. It’s not like, oh, lexicography to do with Paris Hilton, but I thought the verb to Paris, which is to present the most unseemly and disgraceful attributes of your personal life and personality to the public at large, is a verb that the world needs today. So I present to you the verb Paris.

And then and then finally finally I feel an obligation because I published dictionaries for learners of English and I just quickly looked we have a list of words that we have a dictionary online it’s at www.dictionaries.cambridge.org that’s a shameless plug shameless commercial plug that’s why I get paid to come here and we have we keep track of all the words that people have looked for in our online dictionaries that were not there and the one word that presents itself to me as being really worthy is the word Phoenix F-I-N-I-X.

Now of course the people who look it up on the online dictionary and don’t find it don’t leave any traces as to what it might mean. So I think Phoenix would be to fidget anxiously. So he was phoenixing as he prepared for his speech and there were a hundred and seventy nine instances of people trying to look up the verb the word Phoenix. So clearly there’s there’s momentum for this word and I would like to present Phoenix to the board as as worthy of inclusion.

Those are my new words. I would like to propose an alternate meaning for Phoenix. I think Phoenix should be any word you look up in a dictionary and don’t find a phoenix because that’s what they did they looked a phoenix and it wasn’t there.

Well maybe or maybe it’s just the way dyslexic country folk talk about getting ready to do something as in I’m a phoenix to walk the god get it? No? Okay next up was a nomination from Amy Ronaldo. She runs a crossword blog called diary of a crossword theme.

Okay let me ask you all a question. Have you ever found yourself you just got too busy too distracted you didn’t get around to eating when you were supposed to have a meal or have a snack and you lose your ability to cope? You’re mad at everything traffic is bad. I see a lot of people nodding. There’s a word for that that I saw in the December 2005 article in the New York Times hangry a combination hungry and angry.

And I use the word my friends use the word it just really resonates and it describes something that we feel but there wasn’t a word for before. Yeah hangry dates back to at least as 1999 although the definition tends to vary usually it’s said to be a combo of course of hungry and angry but they don’t explain exactly why if you don’t eat you’re angry.

It’s I guess you’re frustrated. Did you want to elaborate on that Amy? Spoken like a man who’s never had a low blood sugar problem.

Yeah as Wendy says it’s a I guess a synonym for hitting the wall or in bicycling they call it bonking right? I think I have often been the victim of the hangries and you get very cranky if you haven’t had something to eat for a while and you take it out on those around you.

The fact that this dates back to 1999 is a good thing because lexicographers are usually chasing after the language not we’re not in front of it we don’t lead the parade we’re sweeping up behind after the elephants. So the longer it’s been out there and the more people we see using it the more evidence it is that there’s that it’s actually useful.

So lexicographers often adopt a wait and see attitude towards a word. So a word that got coined just last week unless it was a tremendous news import some brand new invention you know if cold fusion worked next week and they came up with a new term for it that would go in this year Sputnik was definitely like that.

So but other words we wait and see are people really going to use this and so hangry being around since 1999 is a good sign. Wait a second let me clarify we all know about the elephantine piles left behind a parade of animals but I don’t think Aaron was commenting on the quality of our dictionaries just pointing out that we lexicographers are usually trying to sort out the coins and candy from the kaka.

We’re there to collect anything of value. See next Dave Epstein plays off of Paul’s term to Paris with one of his own. For the last of some time I’ve been thinking about kind of the same thing that I think Paul was talking about with Paris you know to Paris this obsession of the 24-hour news media when they will pick up a certain kind of sleazy story and go over and over and over it for hours days weeks until the next one comes along.

And I’ve been trying to think of a word that would fit that and also fit the other part of it which is where ordinary people like us are very excited or supposed to be excited about what’s going on with Paris Hilton or Anna Nicole Smith.

So my nomination is news erotica NEWS then the rest of it is like erotica news erotica pornographic obsession with salacious news. News erotica actually appears to be a completely brand new coinage it doesn’t show up on zero hits on google zero hits on usenet groups zero hits on google book search zero hits on amazon full-text search zero hits on fact of a newspaper database.

So you are the coiner of news erotica as far as we can tell. Oftentimes people feel that they are the first person to coin a word and they get upset when they find out that they’re not which I don’t think that they should do because my personal theory is that these kinds of amalgamations of word parts that show that fit together they connect in such a way that their connection is something that can be done really by any speaker in whom those parts happen to connect.

And so I was once called by a reporter who was talking about new words and he said I have coined a great new word the word is santagnostic and a santagnostic is a person who doesn’t know whether or not they believe in Santa right? So and I said that’s a great word did you google it?

And he said no it never occurred to him to google it because obviously he invented this word he’d never heard it before. So he googled it and he was on the phone with me I could hear him deflate because he googled it and there were at least a dozen citations of people using the word santagnostic in the very same sense of not knowing whether or not you know not being having a definite answer as to whether or not they believed in Santa.

Santagnostic is probably not going to go into dictionary anytime soon. I could have let him go on believing that he was the coiner of santagnostic it was just a knee-jerk reflex to say did you google it?

So if you but we googled it and you’re it news erotica is your coinage as far as we know. Aaron’s excitement about the new coinage was followed by her story about the problem with perception.

The recency effect is that anything that you haven’t personally seen before must be no and that of course does any does anybody know this word that I have been asked for over and over again over the past decade and have never turned up is there in fact a word for the phenomenon where you notice something once and then it turns up all the time everywhere?

Yes what’s the word on the word origins that word discussion forum they call it Diego scarcity after and found patterned after the coinage of serendipity because Diego Garcia is a tiny island that’s right yes.

So of course if you so if you have Diego Garcia city no do you know Garcia Diego Garcia? So someone mentions Diego Garcia to you and then you think oh I’ve never heard of that before and then the next day you’re opening up the travel section of times and it says visit beautiful Diego Garcia and then the day after that you talk to somebody and you say hey where are you from and they say Diego Garcia.

I’ve also heard it called pattern after deja vu and jamais vu toujours vu oh that’s nice another term I know for Diego Garcia is the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon used all the time on the discussion forum of the St.

Paul Pioneer Press newspaper next Scott Nelson proposed a word that grabbed our attention because it involved a tool lexicographers use a lot. Like I tried googalicious and taken, but I hit on googletudinous and it didn’t show up. But I don’t know about those other sites. It didn’t Google out though, and it simply it would be the equivalent grammatically of saying this society is litigious. This project is googletudinous. It lends itself to a lot of googling. So that’s all. Thank you very much. I just googletudinous means to have the attitude of Google or to be multitudinous and plentiful like Google. Lots of gifts ripe for googling. There we go, perfect definition, sweet, sweet and to the point. So right for googling. Cool, thank you.

Yeah, I like that word. Googletudinous is the kind of word you’ll often find on Mark Peters’ website, word lustitude. Mark thinks of new words and then goes out to see if other people have used them. Mark wasn’t able to attend the conference, but another online dictionary keeper, Carl Burnett, was. Carl is a competitive skier whose website ski dictionary.com records terms used in alpine ski racing.

You can hear the panelists rumbling in the background as we discuss who is getting kicked off the island. As a bird, a word that my brother uses all the time, it’s a noun, stoop. This I would spell this s t u p e so as not to confuse it with the front steps of a building, for example. And I guess I just looked it up. I didn’t realize this, but apparently this is a legitimate word with a completely different meaning, probably somewhat dated. It’s a hot, wet, often medicated cloth used as a compress. But the way that we use this is of course to refer to a stupid person, idiotic person.

And I didn’t find it in the sense in any dictionaries, but I did just notice on Google Books that it is given as a synonym for both chowder head and chuckle head. So apparently this may have some legitimacy already as a word. I don’t know, what do you guys think?

Yeah, we googled it and Carta actually has an entry for it and they did it to the mid 18th century. People have been dumb a long time.

Yeah, you know, Aaron has said this, but it definitely bears repeating. I find again and again that when people come to me with words that they’re like, you know, isn’t it crazy that people are using this word incentivize? Why, I’m hearing it all the time. I’m like, you know, it goes back as far as like 1961. Words are older than you think, almost always, almost always.

This brings up something that we haven’t talked about yet, real words, right? You said somebody said that’s not a real word, and by that they meant that word’s not in a dictionary, right? Or they hadn’t heard of that word before. And in fact, being in a dictionary doesn’t make a word any more real than not being in a dictionary. The test of the reality, the test of reality is whether or not somebody uses it. If somebody uses it as a word, it is a word, especially in English.

You know, it’s me banging in a nail with my cell phone. You know, in addition to being a very stupid thing to do, does not turn my cell phone into a hammer. But me deciding to call my cell phone a blit makes blit a word. Not a very successful word in the same way that it’s not a very successful hammer, but words behave that way. If you have a whale that doesn’t have a radio transmitter on it, that doesn’t mean that whale doesn’t exist. It just means that the people who study whales don’t know about it.

And it’s the same thing with words. Just because we haven’t tagged it and put it in the dictionary does not make it not real. It’s use that makes things real. So sorry to be so indignant about this, but they’re all real. They’re not imaginary. If you hallucinated the word in a dream, that’s not a real word. If you wake up in the morning and start using it, guess what? Now it’s a real word.

Next, Leslie Ann Fogle brought us a word whose subtlety required a little clarification. I got one that’s it seems really simple, but I haven’t seen it. Wordly. Wordly, w-o-r-d-l-y. Wordly, other relating to words in their variations by definition, language or dialect. And I’m referring to like the synonymous impact of a word because there’s multiple meanings or because of the direct meaning or phonetic similarity in a foreign language.

And it’s about this, you know, the semantics having to do with the use of words, definitions of other relating to words in their variations by definition, language or dialect variations. I think by language you might mean etymology, so or cross-linguistic connections. You want to make wordly considerations when you choose your words, right?

That’s nice. We have a comment on worldly. It’s actually already in the Oxford English Dictionary. Yay, back to 1633. Or the slightly different meaning, it says dealing in or consisting in mere words, semicolon verbal. So this is a new sense that you have. You’re making a case then for another sense of wordly then?

Yes, because it’s perfectly fine. I mean that is actually one of the things that we all probably find ourselves doing as lexicographers is convincing people that it’s perfectly okay for a word to have more than one meaning or shades of meaning or to change meaning, which is why you have multiple, you know, many dictionaries and they don’t necessarily divide the senses the same way.

So now I think it’s time for us to vote. The panel picked four candidates from the word submitted. News Radhika took a special prize, a t-shirt from Charles Hudson of predictionary.com for being the best completely new coinage. Wendy provided a rundown of the top contenders for overall winner.

Invertebrates, those who engage in spineless misbehavior. All emergency, to be in a hurry to get in touch with the universe. Gray buckle and view buckle, with and without a view. Those are cubicles. To Paris, to present the most unseemly attributes of one’s personality to the world at large. Phoenix, to fidget anxiously. News Radhika, word for when the media loop stories that go on for 24 more hours, indicate a pornographic obsession with salacious news. Google to this, right for googling, right.

And I do think that your sense of wordly, which we think has to do more broadly with other relating to words, is a worthy one to think of as well. New meaning rather than a new word. There we go.

All right, so your favorite grant, I hope that can nominate News Radhika. I mean, I know you won the prize for the complete absolute new word, right? Can I nominate News Radhika? Yes, all right, I’m going to nominate News Radhika. I mean, I don’t have a problem with the word taking the prize in two categories.

And judging by the popularity of that word in this room, I suspect that it’s got legs, as they say in the film business. So my favorite word of the bunch was News Radhika. Okay, I am going to go with wordly because I really think that it’s a good example of how words can change in subtle ways and still fill a need.

And I guess I’ll go with Google to this, right for googling. Was there? I might have gone for News Radhika, but that was already taken. So do we have a wild card? All right, do we have a wild card? It is hangry because we just like it when somebody’s on to something.

She’s found a word with it. Despite the fact that there is already evidence that the word exists means that the re-coinage is not a problem. Coming up, the word, even though somebody else came up with it, just means that there is a need for it, demonstrable need for the word angry, right? I think it means that, Amy, you have a good eye for the word.

All right, so we’re going to vote. So the first one was News Radhika, so we’ll do grant, you’ll do a tally. And then, you know, so the one with the most votes gets the big dictionary and then the two runners-up get the little books. Hangry, you get the dictionary.

All right, well then, then the hardback goes to wordly. Congratulations. And the soft cover goes to News Radhika, so he wins in two categories. Congratulations.

So thank you so much for coming out to our event through the traffic and the rain, and we really appreciate it. If you have questions about the Society of North America, we’re googled toodenists. Congratulations to the winners. They took home copies of the new Oxford American Dictionary and Alan Metcalfe’s book, predicting new words.

All in all, it was a highly successful event and great fun. Special thanks again to Charles Hodson of predictionary.com, that’s P O dictionary.com. Somewhere in between producing his own word of the day podcast and writing carnal knowledge, a book of body-related words due out in August, Charles came up with the idea for this podcast. He recorded it and shared his raw audio with us.

Thanks, Charles, for your excellent work. For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett. Thanks for listening to our special summer podcast of the Dictionary Society of North America’s new word open mic. You can hear more of our special summer podcast and find all of the websites mentioned on today’s show at KPBS.org.

(upbeat music) Bye.

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