Glibido : The obsession with neologisms, aka neologmania

It is high time to futurize (“modernize” is so 20th century!) the language, be more daring creationwise* (we really wise up more and more, moneywise*, nutritionwise*, even maturationwise*), and create a survivable,* made-for-2010 version* of English to ensure its contemporaneousness.* Twittering* and blogging*, IM-ing* and texting*, facebooking* (or Facebooking*?) and downloading* i-tunes* are just the first baby steps towards a dearly needed cyberfied (making compatible to the internet) language. English has become so marmorealized* (marmoreal = like marble + -ize = become like marble) that it really needs a thorough face-lift, a little bit botoxation* to volumize* its potential. As soon as those neologisms are properly dictionarized, the adultification* (state of becoming an adult) of textisms* (principles of texting) will rapidly progress and everybody conversercise (if we can jazzercise, why not conversercise?) in a more netesque (reminiscent of the internet) way, such as albumizing* fauxtographies* (photos corrected and cropped until they fit our expectations), and helping glocals* (people who live locally but surf globally) become locavores* (consumers of locally grown produce). What’s needed are more real language-forwards*, twitterati* and bloggerites who get the ball rolling and divine some new celloquialisms for the tubiverse* (the universe of YouTube). Let’s see how our cume* (cumulative audience) reacts to this brief language shockumentary* and its Doppler Effect (stupid ideas seeming smart when they approach, sounding simply stupid at the instant of passing by, and becoming more and more idiotic during their recession).

* = words seen in print

Although a study by Harold Baayen and Antoinette Renouf examining The New York Times for several years and chronicling some 80 million wordforms found that "most lexical innovations are nonce formations enjoying only ephemeral use," it is fun to go on reading about newspeak. My favorite: "Why language changes."

Many words are formed, using suffixes that indicate their meaning. It is, however, not recommendable to invent new words if another term with the same meaning is already well established (e.g. contemporaneousness instead of contemporaneity). And just because adjectives can be formed by adding a -y to a noun, there is no need to invent words like judge-y people (we have "judgmental") or jungle-y green (Roget's Thesaurus already offers more than fifty different adjectives to decribe the color green) just to be genius-y.


Noun Suffixes

-acy (= state or quality: private → privacy)
-al (= act or process of: to refuse → refusal)
-ance, -ence (= state or quality of: to maintain → maintenance; eminent → eminence)
-dom (= place or state of being: free → freedom)
-er, -or (= one who: to protect → protector; to train → trainer)
-ism (= doctrine: social → socialism)
-ist (= one who: pharmacy → pharmacist)
-ity, -ty (= quality of: real → reality)
-ment (= condition of: to argue → argument)
-ness (= state of being: conscious → consciousness)
-ship (= position held: fellow → fellowship)
-sion, -tion (= state of being: translate → translation)

Verb Suffixes

-ate (= to become: grade → graduate)
-en (= to become: height → heighten)
-ify, -fy (= to make or become: terror → terrify)
-ize, -ise (= to become: civil → civilize)

Adjective Suffixes

-able, -ible (= capable of being: eat → edible)
-al (= pertaining to: region → regional)
-esque (= reminiscent of: picture → picturesque)
-ful (= notable for: beauty → beautiful)
-ic, -ical (= pertaining to: myth → mythic)
-ious, -ous (= characterized by: nutrition → nutritious)
-ish (= having the quality of: fiend → fiendish)
-ive (= having the nature of: create → creative)
-less (= without: end → endless)
-y (= characterized by: sleaze → sleazy)


Interested in invented languages?

At 3:34 am local time, February 27th, a devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. The photo above inspired me to reread the literary account of another earthquake in the same country but almost 400 years ago. Written in 1807, Kleist's novella The Earthquake in Chile has lost nothing of its horror. The original German version Das Erdbeben in Chili is also available on the internet.

It all depends

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams

And so much depends upon the right preposition matched with its object beside the verb.

Prepositions are the little – and very tricky – words that define the relation between the parts of a sentence, and there is a huge difference between thinking up a solution or thinking about one, between talking about one’s neighbor and talking with him.

In itself, a word like about or up is rather meaningless, but combined with other words prepositions help determine when or where or under what conditions something happened. And yet, they are such mischievous troublemakers. Why do we have dinner at our house but prepare it in the kitchen? Why is he under stress and she is at ease? Trusting our ears will not always yield the correct result as the following sentences, all taken from major newspapers, illustrate.

Union membership for men dropped 11.4%. While the membership fee for a certain group may drop, membership among men has dropped.

Mrs. Name concurred in this sit-tight strategy. In fact, she concurred with it, which is just another way to say, she agreed with it.

Warner Bros. romantic comedy "Valentine's Day" seduced an estimated $10.4 million from about 4,400 screens in 58 markets. The comedy may have seduced movie goers in 58 markets to spend $10.4 million. It certainly didn’t seduce any money from screens.

Max wrote about his lifelong embarrassment of his brother Nat. Max probably wrote about his embarrassment at this brother’s behavior or that Nat’s behavior was an embarrassment to him.

A movement of Mahler would indicate that a certain person by the name of Mahler made a particular move. Yet, the author wrote about Gustav Mahler’s symphonies and thus about a movement by Mahler.

The odds are definitely against any odds for promotion but very strongly in favor of the odds of being promoted; and someone who finds himself in such an auspicious situation should not be frugal about asking his boss for a raise but simply be frugal and not ask for a 20% increase.

A perfect face-lift shall ensure that someone will never suffer through an overarched eyebrow. This sentence raises eyebrows because it is an example of placing a preposition where in fact none is needed.

The person who suffers such damaging plastic surgery then may need some pampering and decide to stow away to her favorite spa. Nothing against some pampering, but at her favorite spa.

High school’s last year didn’t yield anything other than to make one an unwed mother and a couple of them into victims of major car collisions. Why should the same situation make "one a mother" and "others into victims"? The preposition into is as much a surplus as is – in the author’s opinion – twelfth grade.

Some politicians claim that health care reform would be a great help towards struggling families. Others believe that they should rethink the whole plan and start over from a clean sheet of paper. Let’s start over with a clean sheet and make sure that the plan will be of help to families.

The crucial question is whether we know of prepositions or know something about them. When in doubt, a good dictionary will provide the correct answer.

Here is a good list of words that require particular prepositions.