By Stevenson Swanson, Chicago Tribune correspondent
Are you a locavore(+1) who decries the tapafication(+2) of restaurants or a latte liberal(+3) on the fence about Billary(+4)? No matter, the explosion of new words in the English language is enough to make you want to bury your head under a blankie(+5) or run off to Godzone(+6).
English always has been something of a mongrel language, but thanks to e-mail and the Internet, the spread of English around the world and a playful response to changing times, new words and phrases are cropping up so quickly that one language watcher calculates that English is bearing down on a milestone--its 1 millionth word.
"English is like an open language that absorbs every type of word from all different languages," said Paul Payack, who runs Global Language Monitor, a Web site and language-consulting business. "English is a people's language. It grows from the ground up."
Payack, whose Web-based word-watching started in 1999 with the site YourDictionary.com, figures there are about 995,000 words in the English language. Sometime this year, he forecasts, the mother tongue of Shakespeare and Lincoln will tip over the seven-figure mark.
By contrast, Payack says, Spanish has about 275,000 words, and French only about 100,000.
Using a series of mathematical formulas, Payack tracks new words as they crop up in databases of printed materials, such as major newspapers and magazines, and on the Internet.
If the number of citations reaches what Payack considers a critical mass, he adds the word to his master lexicon, which he compiled by assembling the word lists of about a dozen major English dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's unabridged dictionary.
Among his recent additions are "bagonize," to describe the agonizing feeling of waiting for your luggage at an airport baggage carousel, and "smirting," the combination of smoking and flirting that takes place in doorways in an era when indoor smoking is increasingly taboo.
But not every would-be word makes the cut. He recently tested "nakation," a vacation where clothing is optional. Google turned up a few references.
"That would not make it as a word," he said.
Scholars and dictionary editors agree that English has word-spinning built into its DNA.
The language has Germanic origins, but French was grafted onto it when the French-speaking Normans conquered England in 1066. During the Renaissance, Latin words became the vogue, and as the British Empire spread around the globe, its colonies contributed their own distinctive flavors to the language of the rulers.
"More than half of our vocabulary is from other cultures," said Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, which chose "subprime" as the 2007 word of the year. "So we are used to words from a lot of languages and we're used to a lot of new words coming in."
It also helps that English, reflecting the free-market leanings of England and America, has no official gatekeeper, such as the Academie francaise, which keeps French officially pure of foreign--and especially Anglo-American--influences.
But Payack believes the creation of new words has sped up in recent decades in part because of the rapid growth in the number of people who speak English as either a first or second language. He puts the number at 1.35 billion.
And non-native speakers are every bit as likely to coin new words and phrases as native speakers.
"Studies show that when kids learn English in Singapore, they think they own the language," said the San Diego-based Payack. "They take it, they twist it."
That has given rise to the phenomenon of "Chinglish," a Chinese-English hybrid that yields such coinages as "no noising" for "quiet, please," and "airline pulp" for "airline food."
Metcalf, of the dialect society, believes that if all the English words that ever existed were tallied, the count would be far more than a million. But however many words English-speakers have at their disposal, it's clear that most new coinages are as perishable as any other fad. Remember Y2K?
And in 2006, the dialect society selected "to be plutoed" as its word of the year, meaning to be demoted, as happened when Pluto lost its designation as a planet. It didn't catch on. But the 2004 choice of "red state," "blue state" and "purple state," to indicate a Republican, Democratic or undecided state, has proved more durable.
"The most interesting factor to me is unobtrusiveness," said Metcalf, who has studied the reasons for the longevity of certain words or phrases. "People are always coming up with clever, cute coinages, and we laugh at them but we don't use them. A really unobtrusive word is like a stealth word. It just seems natural."
1. locavore: Someone who eats food produced locally.
2. tapafication: The tendency of restaurants to serve small, tapas-like portions.
3. latte liberal: A dismissive term for a fashionable liberal.
4. Billary: Bill and Hillary Clinton.
5. blankie: A common American colloquialism for blanket
6. Godzone: A humorous name for New Zealand, taken from the first words of a popular description of the nation as "God's own country."
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