Ever thought there ought to be an English word for this or that phenomenon? Such holes in the language are called lexical gaps. A listener in Ontario, Canada, notes that English lacks a single word for the mistake voice-to-text programs make when they mishear a dictated word. She proposes mico, pronounced “MIKE-oh,” the equivalent of a typo. A Texas listener wants a word for “the feeling of watching your child reach a milestone,” that mix of pride and sadness when they move on to a new stage in life. She and her friends say that’s feeling mom happy/sads. Can you think of a better one? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Lexical Gaps Fixed: “Mico” for Voice-to-Text Errors and ”Mom Sads””
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
We recently got an email from Beverly in Ontario, Canada, who was looking for a word for that moment when you’re dictating a message and your dictation program misunderstands you.
She writes, I recently dictated the word onerous and my voice to text spelled owner us.
And so she had to go back to all the people on her email thread and explain that this was an error.
And the word that she came up for this kind of mistake was mico, like typo.
Oh, so mic short for microphone.
Yeah.
Following on the typo as a role model.
Yeah, I like it.
I like it.
But that can’t be the only lexical gap we’ve gotten because I know we get them all the time.
Well I was gonna say don’t we get at least one a day.
More than that.
Yeah.
Phone, email, text messages, you name it, they come in because people recognize these holes in the language and they want a neat pat set word.
They want this kind of tidy little package all wrapped up in a single word.
Exactly.
And I mean you know it when you hear it.
You know it’s that little moment of satisfaction.
Like I don’t know, like like when you fill in the last square of a crossword puzzle or you’re doing wordle and all the letters flip over and turn green.
It’s it’s just that satisfying click that I think, you know, makes makes life a little bit more manageable.
I mean here’s another one.
Tristan Seal from Saxey, Texas wrote us to say that she’s a mother of five, and she and her friends were searching for a word for the feeling you have when your child is doing something great, like going to kindergarten, so you’re happy that they’re healthy and they’re ready for kindergarten, but at the same time you’re sad because they’re leaving behind a stage of life.
And you know, for her, she says it feels more than bittersweet, and she thinks that there should be something that applies specifically to parents or mentors, and she and her friends decided on mom happy slash sads, but I just wonder if there’s another word for that.
So happy s happy slash sads, mom, happy slash yeah, but what about dad?
But parental happy sad.
Yeah, I think there should be a compact word for that feeling.
Martha, because we get all these lexical gaps from all of our listeners, we need to do something about them.
Yeah, we would love to hear what lexical gaps you’ve observed, or maybe what lexical gaps you’ve figured out that you can fill, share those with us.
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