Invented Words, Part 1

Where do new words come from? Robert and Joe explore in the latest episode of Invention.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be discussing a
linguistic subject, some linguistic inventions. And I thought it would
be a good idea to begin with some good malapropisms.

(00:23):
I love a good malapropism, and we're of course not
above coining one here and there ourselves on the show sometimes.
Uh So, what's a malapropism before we get into our
favorite examples. It's the usually unintentionally humorous misuse or distortion
of a word or phrase. So usually it's a word
or phrase that sounds like what you mean to say,

(00:45):
but is not what you mean to say. For example,
Jesus healing the leopards. That's a great one. Yeah, they're
often used to comedic effect, like you, like you mentioned
and uh sometimes you'll see the latter. This idea of
it being a phrase defined is a malla for like
a metaphor. Also it sounds delicious, right though we have

(01:06):
to stress that malafor itself is an invented word and
potentially uh and I'll appropism in and of itself. Oh,
I can see that, like somebody was trying to say malapropism,
but they got confused and said malaf right, or or
they just intentionally did it. And we'll get into some
of the more intentional acts of this as we go.
The Sopranos is a great source of very memorable malapropisms.

(01:28):
I like when there's part where Christopher Multa Santi talks
about creating a little dysentery in the ranks, which that
one reminds me of one about scientology, the the idea
that l Ron Hubbard had the philosophy of diuretics. But
there's another one in the Sopranos where the character Little
Carmines he's talking about seeing in the horror movie and

(01:50):
he says it juxtaposes the sacred in the propane. Or
there's a part where Tony describes his mom as an
alba core around my neck. Oh, instead of an albatross.
Very good. This is more of a phrase. But I
instantly thought of the of The Big Lebowski when he's
he points out the Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women. Um,

(02:12):
the code of the Corner Brothers paint with this sort
of brush a lot in their dialogue. I was reading
a little bit about this lip. Basically I was looking
for some more examples of of of malapropisms in the
Coen Brothers work, and I ran across this Senses of
Cinema post by Paul Coughland from several years back, and
he described the Cohen Brothers use of dialogue as quote

(02:35):
the dialogue of wonderful inarticulacy. That's about right. Yeah. Now,
you'll also another place you see a lot of malapropism
is that you'll see it sometimes used as part of
racial stereotypes. One example that comes to mind, and you
see this listed on various like trope websites, is the

(02:55):
Fisher Stevens role in the Short Circuits movies. I've never
seen Short Circuit. Well it's probably alright, there's no reason
to go back to these, but these were a force
movies about about a robot, like they become self aware
and it has like a laser cannon on its shoulder
and it's like a puppet. Does it do cute robot malapropisms? No,
it doesn't. But Fisher Stevens plays Um, an Indian scientist,

(03:19):
uh and and he's this this uh, you know this
this uh, this accent, and he's he just busts out
a number of these and ultimately, you know it's it's
kind of like this idea, the comedic racial stereotype of
someone who doesn't have a great grasp on the English
language and therefore stumbles into all of these. That's unfortunately,
but the use of melopropisms in fiction does go way

(03:42):
way back. Like Shakespeare used malapropisms a lot. The character
of Dogberry and Much Ado about Nothing famously delivers a
bunch of these and their grades. So Dogberry is this
incompetent night constable and he's supposed to be I think
a satire on the amateur police forces of Elizabethan times,
and a lot of the humor comes through and him
giving confused orders like um, he when he's trying to

(04:05):
get one of his deputies to apprehend all vagrants, but
instead he says, you are to comprehend all vagram men
um and he he tells them to be vigetant. I
beseech you uh. And then there's a great part later
where he claims that a bad dude will be condemned
into everlasting redemption. Well, there's a. There's fun to be

(04:25):
had with with with malopropisms, right, because you can sort
of you can have your character fumble into something saying
something a little more articulate than I mean to it. Times. Yes, yeah,
that's interesting, Like the idea of everlasting redemption is sort
of a cool metaphor, even though he just is screwing
up words. But after this character. Actually, since sometime in

(04:46):
the nineteenth century, malapropisms have also been known as dog
barry is ums. There was another one I came across
that I'd never read before. But this is from the
real world. So former Texas Governor and U. S. Energy
Secretary Rick Perry. He's famous for the for saying the
oops when he couldn't remember something. But also, um, that's

(05:07):
not what I was bringing up. On August there was
an article in the Texas Tribune by John Reynolds that
reported that Perry had been speaking to a crowd and
at this event, he told the crowd, quote, we need
to look at the states, which are the lavatories of
innovation and democracy. Uh yeah, so what what with that?

(05:28):
If we were to take that literally, like, what would
that even mean? Uh? I think that's the other thing.
The part of it too, is like, even if they're
not quite accidentally profound, we can't help a puzzle over
it because it will inject a bizarre metaphor mental image
into our head and then we're just forced to wrestle
with it. Right now, there are also just lots of
these people making regular everyday speech. We probably do them

(05:49):
all the time. Everybody does them. One of my favorites
I ran across was the idea of all the people
who died in the blue Bonnet plague. Uh see. I
saw that in the notes, and I didn't even get
it until said it out loud now, and that that
points out an interesting thing, which is that there there
are multiple different ways that people put together malapropisms. Like
I was reading a paper by the linguist Arnold Mzuki

(06:12):
on classical malapropisms, and Swiki points out that lots of
malapropisms are just approximations that come out of our mouths
due to the tip of the tongue effect. This is
something we've talked about on Stuff to Blow your Mind before.
You can go back and find our episode on that
if you google it, I'm sure, but the short version
is you are failing to call the correct word from memory,

(06:33):
and by accident you employ a similar sounding word instead.
You can often hear this, especially in people who may
have been having a bit of alcohol to drink. Like
Often words that get swapped start with the same letters
or sounds, like you know, uh, this database is a
vast suppository of information. I guess actually that wouldn't start
with the same sound, but you know, you know what

(06:54):
I mean. But other times malapropisms have more unique ideologies.
For example, when somebody learns a word or phrase by
mishearing it and then never corrects their original misimpression. I
know this has happened multiple times in my life. Blue
bonnet plague would probably be a good example here. It
suggests that somebody heard somebody talking about the bubonic plague

(07:16):
but misheard how they pronounced it, and then just never
got corrected on that. Yeah, I think we can all
relate to that. We all have examples of that in
our our own life. Totally. But while malpropisms are themselves
a normal part of speech, they go back into the
mist of history. Everybody does them, and everybody's been doing
them for thousands of years. Probably the name we use

(07:37):
for them has a very distinct origin in history, and
that origin lies with an Irish satirist playwright and politician
named Richard Brinsley Sheridan who lived from seventeen fifty one
to eighteen sixteen. Sheridan wrote a number of successful comedies,
but his seventeen seventy five play called The Rivals introduced

(07:58):
the world to a character named Mrs Malaprop, whom another
character says is infamous for delivering words quote so ingeniously
misapplied without being mispronounced. So, for example, Mrs Malaprop calls
one other character the very pineapple of politeness, and at

(08:18):
another point she refers to an allegory lying on the
banks of the nile, which we should point out gets
it wrong twice because the nile has crocodiles, not alligators.
Oh I didn't even get that one at first. Allegory
and alligators. Okay, I think that joke works better on
people who are less obsessed with crocodilians than you and I.
Uh so. So it seems that most usage of the

(08:39):
term malapropism in English actually dates back to this character
in a late eighteenth century Irish play. Maybe all usage
of it, but of course the name Mrs malaprop is
built out of existing words borrowed from other languages, like uh,
there's the there's this expression malapropos, meaning inappropriate, originally from

(09:00):
the French, where it would mean something like out of
place or a miss. But from the name of this
character we now get the label that we use specifically
for malapropisms, words used wrong in this way. And so
today we wanted to look at the phenomenon of invented
words like the word malapropism. There are tons of words
like this, you know. There there are some words that

(09:22):
enter the lexicon from works of fiction or mythology. There
are words that enter through deliberate coinage where somebody is
trying to create a term for a previously unnamed concept.
There are words that enter their changes in technology and
science and culture. And we wanted to talk about some
of our favorite stories of these words and explore how

(09:42):
they differ from other types of words. What what does
it take to invent a successful word and are there
any parallels to the invention of a successful piece of technology. Yeah,
it's it's a fascinating topic because it's, you know, the
world of language. It is a world that is invented,
like all wor words are essentially invented. Um. Well, I

(10:03):
don't know if I agree with you there, because they
all do come from human brains. But I would say
maybe some words could be thought of more like features
of the human body, that maybe they just emerged from
us at some point in history without us trying to
find a word for something. That's true. The more the
sort of primal roots of language, which will be discussing.

(10:25):
But but still it's it's it's unlike most of the
other topics we've done. I don't know if we've done
a linguistic episode of invention yet, have we? I don't
know that there are obviously linguistic inventions. All Right, we're
gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
All right, We're back, all right. So we'd like to

(10:47):
start by asking what came before? Uh? And I guess
in this case we would have to ask where do
words usually come from when they're not being deliberately coined
or invented by somebody. We know that most words are
not deliberate inventions. Obviously, the the deep origins of language
that's a massive and complicated subject, limited in large part

(11:09):
to inform speculations since we don't have physical evidence to
to discover or to refer to. You know, spoken words
don't leave fossils. Uh, And it's it's too big to
address at length today. But by setting linguistics within the
timeline of history, especially with the help of written sources,
we can learn a lot about how languages change over
time and about where words come from. And one thing

(11:33):
that I think is extremely interesting is that many scholars
have noticed important parallels between the evolution of languages and
the evolution of species. In biology, there are important differences
as well, But just to mention one of these similarities,
like the living organisms on Earth, many of Earth's languages

(11:54):
show signs of having a common ancestor. We can show
signs of common ancestry and all living things on Earth
by comparing similarities in the genes and observing how those
genes change over time through evolution. Likewise, we can observe
similarities in some words and formations that many languages separated

(12:15):
over vast distances, seem to share, and observe how those
pronunciations and semantics change over time. And in fact, the
kind of strange thing is that it was obvious that
languages evolve over time from common ancestors. Before it was
obvious that plants and animals do this because you know,
it was obvious because linguists could track these changes through

(12:37):
written sources from history. They could see for themselves how
words and usages and whole languages morphed over the centuries.
Charles Darwin actually wrote in The Descent of Man, quote
the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and
the proofs that both have been developed through the gradual
process are curiously parallel. I was reading a good article

(12:58):
about this by John whit Field in Plos Biology from
two thousand and eight called across the Curious parallel of
language and species evolution and uh so Whitfield's writing about
this subject and uh In addition to common ancestry and
changes to words and genes over time, another parallel that
Whitfield points out is that quote, their most important components

(13:20):
show the least variation. In biology, this means that genes,
such as those involved in the machinery of protein synthesis,
so basically something every organism has to do all the time,
change so slowly that they can be used to discern
the relationships of groups that diverged hundreds of millions of
years ago. Likewise, the most commonly used words, such as

(13:44):
numbers and pronouns, changed the most slowly. Yeah, I thought
that was really interesting. I mean, other words, you can
find other words that seem to persist in fairly stable
forms over long periods of time, and they very often
are common words. You know, words like for family relationships,
words for things like mother and father, and uh for

(14:06):
you know, things that would be referred to very often
in everyday speech. The whereas it's the more specific terms
that may go extinct over time right or face dramatic substitutions.
Uh So, Today more than half of the world's population
speaks a language that shares as a common ancestor and

(14:26):
extinct language called Indo European. One fun example I was
reading about in a Nautilus article from last year by
Sevinga Norkiya Zova was about the word honey. So, of course,
the word honey is honey in English. In Sanskrit it's madhu,
in Russian it's meod. And to bring it back to English,

(14:47):
we have mead, an alcoholic drink made out of honey.
In Sanskrit, Russian, and even in English you've got these
links that you know, words are still basically very similar.
Another interest in fact from that article, UH, a professor
of linguistics at New York University named Gregory Guy talks
about the word locks, which in English, of course means

(15:09):
you know, smoked salmon, you'd have your bagel with locks.
But apparently locks is basically the same word as it
was in proto into European eight thousand years ago, where
it was probably pronounced locks and it meant salmon like
eight thousand years ago. It's interesting to the way both
of these examples are foods. There are things that are

(15:30):
concepts that that that are for things that we we
not only conceive of, but we actually take into our body.
We have such a complete sensory understanding of them. Yeah,
that's an interesting point to things that would have been
delicious from ancient times. But anyway, based on this biological analogy,
I want to use an analogy for the purpose of

(15:50):
the rest of this episode, which is basically biological evolution
versus genetic engineering. Most new words that enter all language
do so through a process more akin to biological evolution.
They somehow arise naturally among speakers rather than as you know,
genetically engineered. You know, we we created a giant scorpion

(16:14):
as a government weapon or something, you know, the great
b movie plot. Um than these genetic engineering projects, and
and those would be more akin to what we're ultimately
going to focus on the attempts to create a new
word on purpose. But let's focus on the biological evolution
version first. So when language is evolved naturally, what happens

(16:35):
at the word to word level? Where do new words
come from if nobody is trying to coin them on purpose? Well,
of course, on our show we've we've discussed plenty of
times if you're looking to invent something new, you can
always just steal something which has already been invented. And yeah,
most inventions are just stealing ideas from other people. Uh,
and or maybe making a very slight modification. So a

(16:58):
very common source of new word is borrowing from existing languages. Yeah,
and these are also known as loan words. Uh. And
one one fun example of this, or at least I
find it fun. I don't know your your mileage may vary,
but um, earworm is one at all? Here? Well well,
well I'm just kidding. That's that's great. Wrong, earworms are

(17:20):
an example of this. Now it's technically a calic that's
suspelled c A l q u E, which is a
specialized version of this in which the original word in
another language is is. It's not just a matter of
taking the say that the German word for something and
using it. It's directly translating it literal, literally word for word.

(17:41):
Other examples of this would be brainwashing or Adam's apple.
But with earworm it stems from the German or verm,
which may have originated with German operetta composer Paul Linkey,
but didn't enter the popular lexicon um until like the
early two thousands. Prior to all of this, or verms

(18:02):
were insects of the order uh dermap tira. Ear wigs
probably named because well, there's one theory is that they
have the their hind wings are kind of ear like.
If you fold them out, they kind of look like
a human ear. But the more likely explanation is that
you have this old wives tale about them crawling into
human ears and laying eggs inside your brain, which of

(18:24):
course becomes part of the idea of like, what is
a song you hear and you can't get it out?
Of your head. It is kind of like a small
insect that has crawled in through your ear into your brain.
It's like those things in con Yeah exactly, but really,
your wigs don't do this, right, No, No, there's no
I think they will, uh from based on the research

(18:45):
I was looking at, I think they will occasionally you
can get one in your ear. I would refer back
to our stuff to Blow your mind episode which I
think will be rerunning soon, about insects crawling inside of
body cavities. It happens, it can happen, but not not
to the degree that wives tales would have you believe.
And not eggs in the brain. No, no eggs in

(19:05):
the brain. We need another phrase, by the way, that's
a that's an unfortunate phrase because who knows our wives
really saying this? Yeah, it is. It is sexist terminology.
Let's just say old folk beliefs and hearsay old starship
captain's tales. Um So. English itself is actually composed of
a huge number of words borrowed from other languages. And

(19:27):
it's not just interesting terms like earworm right. Tons of
everyday terminology is descended from words that were borrowed into English.
Hundreds of years ago. English originally was a West Germanic language,
and and these roots or where we get a lot
of the origins of common basic short words that still

(19:47):
exist in English today. But tons of other words in
English come from other languages. So here's one that I
was just thinking about. What do you call the album
Black Sabbath by the band Black Sabbath, on which the
song black Sabba it appears. It sounds like a trick question.
I think the answer is Black Sabbath. It's the eponymous album, right, yeah, eponymous,

(20:08):
But of course eponymous, that's a that's a word taken
directly from words in Greek. So that's like a Greek
loan word. In English, it means to give one's name
to um. And in a way, it's funny to try
to list words in English borrowed from other languages, because
it would make more sense, really to try to list
the words not borrowed from other languages, descending directly from

(20:31):
Germanic roots, because the vast majority of English words at
this point are borrowed. By some estimates, borrowed words make
up about eighty percent or more of the language, and
some of these words have been borrowed for a very
long time. Many came from languages like French and Latin
hundreds of years ago. The big point of linguistic cross

(20:51):
pollination here is the Norman conquest of England in the
eleventh century, where Norman French suddenly became the language of
government into the ruling class in England. And so this
legacy still exists in English today, where you have tons
of words having multiple synonyms for the same concept. Uh.
And you have a kind of like every day version

(21:12):
of the word that comes from Old English, and then
a more formal or official sounding version of the word
that comes from the French. So like a holdover from
a time when both languages had to exist together at
the same time and the same heads and off the
same lips. Yeah, and then the French derivative ones were
generally the ones in power, the ones with money, and

(21:34):
the ones with administrative authority. So uh, you get like
buy and purchase by from the old English, purchase from
the old French, where you've got dead versus deceased, dead
from the Old English, deceased from the old French. Where
you've got wild from the Old English versus savage from
the old French. But that's a wonderful point about the

(21:55):
idea that that or more of the language is just
word that come from other languages. It it kind of
creates this stone soup sort of scenario for English itself,
like what what is there that is not something that
was brought in to bulk up the recipe. Yeah, that's
a great metaphor. But then ultimately, I mean it gets
complicated because both Old English and Old French or Indo

(22:19):
European languages meaning that so while you know, modern English
has all these words that come from the French lineage
of language development, ultimately both languages are thought to come
from this hypothetical language a long time ago into European.
So they split off, they formed different lineages, they formed
different words that descended from each other, and then at

(22:41):
some point in history they crossed and then entered each other.
It's kind of like a scenario where if you have
like two films that come out and it both essentially
retellings of the Odyssey or the retaellings of Baiwol or
what have you, like, that's the that's in the genes
of the thing. And then but then one sort of
steals from the other, uh like that. So another common

(23:02):
source of words ending up in the language is words
derived from proper nouns. Something that was once the proper
name of a person or a place gets drafted into
a common word or phrase. An example here would be platonic.
Think of a platonic relationship. Now, once this was understood
to refer directly to ideas discussed by Plato, you're talking

(23:23):
about the philosopher Plato. Now platonic does not really necessarily
call Plato to mind. It's just an adjective, right, It
just means, like, you know, a non sexual relationship, but platonic. One.
Another example would be bohemian. Bohemia is a place. It's
in the modern Czech Republic. But now the word Bohemian
doesn't suggest to people anything about that place. So of

(23:44):
course we still have examples of of words that they
still have a direct tie to their source, like say Macavellian.
When someone uses maca I don't know. I tend not
define examples of people misusing it or using it in
a general sense at least yet, but you could well
imagine a future or you know, or a usage of

(24:06):
Macavelli and that really is completely cut off from the
original concepts. There's a good malapropism of machiavellianos where where
somebody's like, that's what Prince Macchiavelli said, but I think
he wasn't a prince. He was the prince by Machiavelli
actually just thought of another good proper name to common usage, denim.

(24:31):
Denim originally is like from day nime. It's like from
a place. Oh I didn't know that. Yeah, okay, well,
oh well, as long as we're talking about about products,
I mean there's of course, Champagne is another example, right,
it's a great one where it's officially it's supposed to
be tied to the Champagne region, but it is often
just used generically. Now it's just a common now it
means bubbly wine. Yeah um yeah. But so another thing

(24:54):
that a great source of new words in this sort
of natural evolution version is back formation. I love this.
Back Formation is when a new word is born when
a prefix or suffix is removed from an existing word
in order to create a new one. Often because people

(25:14):
just assume that these new words already exist because of
linguistic cues. So people create a new word thinking it's
already a word, not realizing that it's not one. So
here's one that I really like, the verb lace, as
in to use a laser. Okay, so this is thinking like,
all right, you have the terminator. What's the terminator? Do

(25:35):
he terminates? What's the laser? Do lasers the heck out
of stuff? Exactly? You've got a fire poker? What do
you do with a poker? You poke? So you've got
a laser. The surgeon has a laser. What do they
do with it? They lace the patient's eye. And this
is a word. Now people use the verb lace all
the time. It's a but it is a back formation.
The word laser is not like the word poker. Laser

(25:57):
is actually an acronym standing for light amplification by stimulated
emission of radiation. But because of its similarity to these
other nouns with a similar spelling that end with e
er like poker, it got back formed into a verb.
And of course this example also shows another new way
that words are formed acronyms. Right, laser was originally an acronym.

(26:20):
Now it's not, you know it, Laser is just a word.
People don't capitalize that. They don't put periods between the letters.
It's just a laser. I was reading about another fun
back formation. This is the kind of back formation known
as a false singular. And the example here is the
English word P, as in p soup. So originally the
Middle English word was piece p E a s e

(26:44):
and this would be the noun that worked as a
singular or a collective, like the word corn, or like
the word wheat. So you could have a bowl of peace,
or you could have a single piece kernel. Well, because
plural words in modern English end in s sound, people
began to assume sometimes the seventeenth century that peace must

(27:05):
be the plural word for the singular P, and then
the word P was thus created. This type of origin again,
this is the false singular. A similar thing would happen
if people started assuming that the singular of moose must
be moo, as opposed to nieces or of course moose

(27:27):
another one that I really like. How about truncation also
known as shortening or clipping. This is when new words
are created by cutting chunks out of existing words. So
mayonnaise becomes mayo, examination becomes exam, refrigerator becomes fridge, robot
becomes bot, application becomes app advertisement, becomes ad. Yeah, we

(27:50):
also see stuff like bicycle and bike, rhinoceros and rhino
or brother becomes bro or bra. One of my favorites.
That also the one that I think it's I find
just so humorous is um when pizza becomes za. I
don't know if actual humans use this or if it's
just like Ninja turtles, but uh, I like to bust

(28:11):
it out for groans now and again, never pay for
la pizza man. Uh. Here's another one blending existing words,
pretty straightforward. You take incomplete parts of words and smash
them together. Breakfast and lunch becomes brunch, Spoon and fork
becomes spork. Podcast itself, we're on a podcast that is
a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast, and some would classify

(28:35):
this particular podcast as infotainment, which is of course a
combination of information and entertainment. So you got a lot
of fun a portmanteau from hell. Yeah, you see a
lot of this in You know, a place where you
see a lot of language generation is the business world,
where you know you have a new product or a

(28:56):
new approach. It needs a new title and needs a
new a new word for this. On sept And A
great way to create it is to just crash two
things together and see how they fit. Are you not infota? Okay?
One more natural source of new words on amotopia. This
is what we call it when a word is formed
by sounding like the thing it's referring to. So plink

(29:17):
honk hiss, the word imitates the sound of the concept.
I was trying to think do we form new on
a mootopias this It seems like all the ones I
can think of have been around for a while. Maybe
we form them less often than some other types of words,
but I'm sure we must form new ones every now
and then. I was trying to think of a good
modern example, and the one I thought of was I'll

(29:39):
ping you about that later. So originally an automotopia from
the nineteenth century, this would, you know, refer to the
sound of a bullet hitting metal or something ping, But
because of conceptual or auditory similarities, it came to refer
to things in the communications sphere, such as like a
sonar communications between submarines or between network computer user. Yeah. Um,

(30:02):
and I would be surprised if the modern resurgence of
ping in the business world or in the workplace didn't
have something to do with the ping like notification sounds
and email and chat apps. Uh. Yeah, I was trying
to think of some more like some recent ones, and
I was looking around at some examples of sort of
modern lingo, and perhaps yeat is an example. I'm not

(30:27):
sure what does that? What does that imitate? The sound of? Well? Okay,
well let me define it for anyone so as the
kids will use this term these days. According to uh,
to my sources on the internet, it seems to be
either a strong version of yes or to quote, throw
something forcefully in a specified direction, as in I yeeded

(30:47):
a cup of noodles across the room. Yeah, but like heat,
like I can sort of, I'm not sure. I'm not
positive that there's any um in anything to it, Like
to throw something doesn't necessarily create the sound of yeat.
But then when you start like trying to figure out
how the sounds work in your head, you know, I
can sort of half formulate a case for yeat being

(31:09):
an actual sound. God, we sound so cool right now.
I'll have to keep thinking about that one. Think about
it the next time you throw something across the ring. Okay, alright,
on that note, We're going to take one more break,
but when we come back we will dive into some
examples of intentionally invented words. All right, we're back. Okay.

(31:34):
Now we've been looking at ways that words arise in
language without being intentionally invented. When they arise through the process,
that's more akin to biological evolution. But what about when
we want to frankenstein some words just like make them
in the lab um. So sort of going back to
the business scenario, you've got a new product that you
need to get out there, or you're rebranding another one

(31:54):
and you gotta call it something. Well, I know somebody
who would have been great at branding, and that's the
English writer Horace Walpole, who lived from seventeen seventeen to
seventeen uh And the term that he coined that everybody knows.
He actually coined quite a few, but most of them
are forgotten. The one that everybody knows is serendipity. And

(32:16):
this comes from a letter that Walpole was writing to
a friend named Horace Man, different from the American education reformer.
I'm pretty sure I think this Horseman was a British diplomat.
But the letter was dated January seventeen fifty four. And
despite the magical delight of serendipity as a concept, I

(32:37):
have to say the occasion by which he ends up
describing it is incredibly dull. Basically, Walpole says that he
accidentally discovered a historical link between two families while he
was studying their coats of arms in a reference book.
Earth shaking right. But he's writing about this process, and
he says, quote, this discovery indeed is almost of that

(33:00):
kind which I call serendipity, a very expressive word, which,
as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall
endeavor to explain to you. You will understand it better
by the derivation than the definition. I once read a
silly fairy tale called the Three Princes of serendip As
their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries by accidents

(33:21):
and sagacity of things which they were not in quest of.
For instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind
of the right eye had traveled the same road lately,
because the grass was eaten only on the left side,
where it was worse than on the right. Now do
you understand serendipity. One of the most remarkable instances of

(33:42):
this accidental sagacity, for you must observe that no discovery
of a thing you were looking for comes under this description.
Was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who, happening to dine at
Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke
of York and Mrs Hyde by the respect with which
her mother treated her at table god riveting right dinner.

(34:04):
How he treated her. Oh man, it's it's hard to
believe the term really took off at all reading this,
but it's a great term, right, because it really does
describe something, the idea of a happy accident, that the
occurrence or development of events by a thing that was,
you know, in a way that's beneficial, but that was

(34:24):
not intended by the agent. Yeah, like when you run
into an old friend at a subway on a subway ride,
you think this is exactly like a one eyed donkey
eating grass on one side of the road. I think something,
at least in the way I use the word. It's
especially serendipitous if it's um a situation in which you know,

(34:45):
in the course of trying to do one thing, especially
if that thing is foolish or misguided, you actually accomplish
something different and good. Yes, it's like the foolishness of
the original errand that makes something especially serendipitous. But according
to a post that excerpted from this letter in the
Paris Review, the adjective form of the word serendipitous was

(35:08):
not recorded until nineteen forty three. So that's a pretty
big spend of time. And I wonder do intentionally invented
words take longer on average to find all of their
derived parts of speech. I don't know. I mean, it
seems like they have to have a certain amount of
sticking power to just like language is a living thing,
you know. Um, so if you create a word and

(35:31):
it doesn't take off, you know, if someone's out there
not making it happen, like pushing it into the into
the lexicon, Yeah, how does it ever gain a foothold? Well?
I think about the fact that when a word feels organic,
you're more likely to assume that it's derived different parts
of speech already exist, right, that you're not making them
up when you say them, Whereas when a word is

(35:53):
something that you're aware of, as like an intentional recent coinage,
you might be more likely to think, oh, serendipitous that's
not a word. This is also probably the struggling point
for ZA. Right. That's why why I think that I
could be wrong that I don't think a lot of
people are using ZA as an abbreviation for pizza just
because it's it's It sounds fake, it doesn't seem helpful. Okay.

(36:15):
So Walpole also provides early written evidence for some other terms,
though not necessarily always of his intentional coinage. When I
was reading about that I thought was great is from
an article in The New Republic by David Crystal that's
all about terms for drunkenness in English. A lot of
these are forgotten, and this term comes from Walpole. The

(36:36):
term is muckibus, meaning drunkenly sentimental, which is a good
thing to have a word for, right, like you know,
I love you man, No, I love you man. Muckibus
uh sounds a little bit like sucky bus too, so
it has this kind of like demonic of quality to
it as well of the of the will being overpowered.
Would you believe that this word comes from a dinner party.

(37:00):
So it's an anecdote that Walpole shares in a letter
to George Montague on April seventeen, fifty six, Walpole says,
so he's at a dinner party, he's having supper. He
overhears somebody named Lady Coventry saying that if she drank anymore,
she would become mucky buss. And then somebody named lady
Mary Coke asks what that means, and Coventry says that

(37:22):
it was Irish for sentimental. Crystal writes quote. The mock
Latin ending is known from other facetious eighteenth century slang formations,
such as stinky buss, but there is no obvious connection
with muck. Lady Coventry came from Ireland. The likelihood is
that Walpole misheard a genuine Irish word, perhaps, and here

(37:47):
I'm gonna do my best with an Irish word here
queen yuck, which is spelled m A O I t
h n e a c h Ireland to get it together.
Come on, that's okay. I think it's ween yuck uh,
and it means sentimental. Yeah, I should say. Crystal's article
also mentions a bunch of other terms for drunkenness, including

(38:09):
my new favorite uh not a loan word, not a
new coinage, a classic Anglo Saxon word which is sim
bell goal, meaning wanton with drink feasting. This one also
sounds demonic in nature, which is I went to the
Black Sabbath and I became Simon bell goal. Thinking about
serendipity though, actually got me on the subject of another

(38:31):
invented word that I really like. That comes from the
American philosopher Daniel Dinnett, and it's his concept of a deepity.
I think we've talked about this on Stuff to Blow
your Mind before, but I read about this idea in
Dinnett's book called Intuition, Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking,
remember discussing that. So a deepity is a special kind

(38:54):
of equivocation. And of course equivocation is a word or
phrase that's used in two different way as to a
misleading effect. So you might say, like, um, why would
you read all the arguments for and against Dennett's theory
of consciousness? Isn't there enough arguing in the world? You know, uh,
people people say stuff like this all the time, you

(39:14):
know it hinges on two different meanings of the word argument.
In one sense, an argument is just explaining why you
think something's true. In another sense, it means like angry
or acrimonious. So so that's an equivocation. Generally, a deepity
is a specific kind of equivocation that you'll probably recognize
immediately from your life. It's a statement that can either

(39:34):
be interpreted as true and utterly trivial or profound and
obviously false. Okay, but it but it takes advantage of
like the good haves of both of these versions. So
an example would be if somebody says love is just
a word. So either you're talking about the word love,

(39:57):
in which case this statement is true, but it is
a banal truism and doesn't okay, so what, Yes, the
word love is a word, or you're saying that the
feeling of love is itself nothing more than a word,
in which case the statement is stupid and nobody would
bother paying any attention to you. There was I want

(40:19):
to say on burto echo wrote something about or I
can't remember if you wrote it or quoted it about
some uh some some treatment on the on the rose
uh saying like the first person to make this statement
was quite possibly a genius and the second person to
make it was an idiot. Um oh was he talking
about nominalism though? With William Vacham in the name of

(40:39):
the likely so, but yeah, it was. It was from
I want to say it was from the introduction or
the the afterword to the name of the rose, but
it's since been whilst I've read that. Well, I mean,
I guess. Another thing that's true is like with any statement,
even an obviously stupid one, with enough effort, you can
find something that that might be true about it a
way of interpreting it, or if the the actor reciting

(41:02):
the line is skilled enough, it can seem a lot
more profound than it is, and you can be like, oh, man, yeah,
love is just a word. I just heard Benedict Cumberbatch
say it, and I'm feeling it hardcore. Right, It's totally different.
Brian Cox could say it and I'd be like, oh,
he's right. But if it's the actor who plays Badger

(41:22):
on Breaking Bad, different story, entirely right. In fact, love
is just a word is a great example because you
can make tons of deepities with the X is just
a y formulation. Lots of them are like this one
example that we thankfully hear a lot less of than
we used to. Like ten years ago, this was everywhere
you looked. Evolution is just a theory. Remember this one.

(41:44):
So it hinges on two different understandings of the word theory.
One interpretation of the sentence is true but trivial. Another
interpretation of the sentence, where theory means something like unfounded
speculation would up end all of modern biology if it
were true, but his pat ly false. Yeah, it does.
That statement does tend to hinge on misunderstanding of what

(42:06):
theories are and what role they play in our understanding
of the world. Other things are not quite as obvious
as a deepity, but feel vaguely deepity ish one that
I was, one that I came across. His beauty is
only skin deep like. In one sense, this could be
saying physical beauty is only physical, which is true but
not very profound. Or it could be saying beauty has

(42:28):
nothing to do with transcendent qualities like morality or character,
in which case is that true, like don't we often
find things beautiful because they're morally good or thoughtful or meaningful? Yeah.
Depending on how you interpret it, it it it could mean
one of two, just dramatically different ideas, and the sense
in which it is obviously true doesn't really mean anything

(42:49):
I noticed in the real world. Deepity is often shoot
by you real fast. They tend to be the kind
of thing that somebody doesn't just say and leave hanging,
but they say and then move on from You know,
they're talking very quickly, like they can sound good for
half a second if you don't stop to think about them.
But I was also thinking about deepity is interesting because

(43:09):
there's something about the way the words sounds that was
clearly part of the selection process for attaching this word
to this concept like uh. Originally, Dinntt says that the
word was coined by a daughter of a friend of his.
Her name is Miriam Wisenbaum, and originally she had been
at the dinner table sort of like lightly mocking her

(43:30):
father for some kind of kind of overly ponderous thing.
He said uh. And then Dinnett heard this word from
her and then reimagined it because of the sound of
the word fits so well with the concept that he
wanted a word for uh. And it brings to mind
the concept of idiophones, which we explored on an episode
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Basically, the idea that uh,

(43:52):
certain um syllables and words sounds in our in our
minds are naturally widely associated with with concepts such as
physical textures, like there are words that naturally sound slimy
to us or have certain kind of moral connotations to
us that are just like sounds totally apart from semantic meaning, right, Yeah.

(44:15):
You often see this in the like the names of
fictitious characters. Um. Part of this is is we've been
on a Harry Potter kick at the house and so
like a lot of the names that J. K. Rowling uses,
you know that, I feel feel like they line up
with this rather well. You know, like uh um, several
snape you know, that's just it drips it. It feels

(44:39):
and sounds like the the the individual it is. It
hisses like a Slytherin, Yeah, Slytherin itself exactly. Yeah. But
I mean there is something going on here. I think like,
if you're not building a neologism entirely out of root
words that have semantic meanings, I mean, it's a different
thing to go with, like malapropism, where that's built out
of root words from another language age that have some

(45:01):
kind of meaning already. You wouldn't be able to tell
what deepity means just by looking at the word right right,
It doesn't doesn't have a semantic suggestion unless you've heard
it explain to you or heard it used. So to
what extent is possible Idiophonic residue guide the choice of
words being linked to concepts like that. I mean, I'm

(45:21):
thinking about it in my head itty deep bitty, the
itty part of it somehow sounds like the concept to me,
what brings to mind itty biddy, It brings it mind smallness,
So it's like a small small depth. But it like
that's kind of a stretch. It's not there's nothing you
can't really get there by analyzing actual grammar, right because

(45:43):
itty bitty is itty bitty even in Webster's I don't know,
it's it's very much slang. Uh, it's bits. I'm not
even sure where that comes from, itty bitty, I don't
know deepitty, just in terms of in examples of have
invented terminology. Uh, this is what I was thinking about recently.

(46:04):
Psychonaut because when you when you hear it, I mean
it's composed out of the out of the Greek. So
you it's easy to assume that this has been with
us a very long time, but it is more like malapropism,
and that it's built out of roots that do have
meanings that you could identify. Yes, yeah, because I clearly
it's drawing from the popular use of say astronaut, which

(46:25):
means star sailor or cosmonaut, universe sailor. And of course
you have the the argonauts of Greek myth, who were
simply sailors in the vessel argo um. But psychonaut. When
I was looking into it, I was thinking, Okay, this
term must have been around here in the sixties. Uh,
And it apparently wasn't. The term is widely used now,
but it didn't seem to emerge until German author Ernst

(46:48):
Hunger used it in nineteen in the nineteen seventy, and
it was subsequently picked up by various occultists and ethnobotanists,
and now it's become, you know, just sort of a
standard and really quite useful term for describing various twenty
or twenty first century individuals like say John C. Louis
or Terrence Mackinna, people who were explorers in the realm
of the mind. Yeah, yeah, but also yeah, but also

(47:10):
drawing in that sort of astronaut and motif of one
of one who goes out by going in and then
Joe I know you want to discuss, uh, the thagomizer.
Oh right, this comes from This is one of our favorites.
It's come up on stuff to blow your mind a lot.
So the thagomizer is something that was coined as a
joke in a Gary Larson cartoon. It refers to the

(47:31):
arrangement of spikes on the tail of a stegasaurus. Uh
and it's uh So there's a Gary Larson Far Side
cartoon where a caveman is apparently teaching a class and
is pointing to a picture like a slide projector I
G a slide of one of these things and says,
now this end is called the thagomizer, after the late

(47:51):
thag Simmons, which is wonderful. Yeah. So, so this was
eventually picked up by actual paleontologists who found this hilarious
because prior to this so you didn't have a name
for the spiked tail is just the spike tail of
a Stegasaurus or some other type of stegasaur. And when
you when you try to start breaking down how thagomizer
would even work as a word, it's crazy because okay,

(48:14):
we have fag. Fag is the name of the caveman,
victim of the dinosaur, your proper down there, right. And
but then we come to almiser O M I z r.
And this is just nonsense because yes, you do have
some English words that end with almiser, but their words
like randomizer, economizer, customizer, atomizer, and these all are root

(48:37):
words that themselves end in um, like atom and then
we get atomizer. So where does the arm come from
in thagom eiser? The eyser part of makes more sense
because I guess it's kind of like with tenderizer that
brings us to eyes. So if you allow us to
further u etomologize here, uh, it is just an old suffix,

(49:00):
like a long established suffix that that turns that allows
us to make a noun or adjective into a verb,
and then this can in turn be made into a noun.
So I just etymologized. I am the etymologizer, which is
not a real word but could be could extrapolate into it,
and you could follow the trails back to real words. Fagomizer,

(49:22):
if we are stretching, would at best mean a thing
that turns one into thag simmon, which makes no sense.
And yet at the same time, the joke still works.
Like me, clearly it worked. It was picked up, it
becomes an unofficial name for this part of the dinosaur.
I think official now is it official? Yeah, I mean
I think it's used in scientific publications. Well that sounds

(49:45):
good enough to me. So clearly it works when we
hear it, even though it doesn't when you dissect it linguistically.
It's just nonsense. But but we buy into it. I
guess you know, fag was perhaps atomized or tenderized by
the spiked tail, and you know that is weirdly a
relayed in the term thagomizer, even though it's just kind

(50:06):
of a distorted echo of actual language. Unfortunately, I think
we're gonna have to call it here for today. We're
running out of studio time, even though yeah, but yeah,
we um we will be back with part two of
our series Uninvented Words. Here. I'm having a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah,
this is this is a this is a fun one,
and I like where this journey is going because eventually
we can even get into the realm of invented language.

(50:28):
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Invention, find us wherever you find podcast wherever
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If you go to invention pot dot com that'll shoot
you over to the I Heart listing for the show,
but you will find us all over the place. Wherever
you get the show. Just make sure you subscribe, you rate,
and you review huge. Thanks as always to our excellent

(50:48):
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at invention in pop dot com. Invention is production of
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(51:10):
listen to your favorite shows. H