Invention Playlist 4: Invented Words, Part 1

Where do new words come from? Robert and Joe explore...

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Episode Transcript

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(01:27):
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.
I love a good malapropism, and we're of course not
above coining one here and there ourselves on the show sometimes.

(01:47):
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 a phrase that sounds like what you mean to say,
but is not what you mean to say. For example,
Jesus healing the leopards. That's a great one. Yeah, they're

(02:09):
often used to comedic effect, like you like you mentioned
and h sometimes you'll see the latter. This idea of
it being a phrase defined as a malaphor like a metaphor. Also,
it sounds delicious, right though we have to stress that
malaphor itself is an invented word and potentially a malapropism
in and of itself. Oh, I can see that, like

(02:31):
somebody was trying to say malapropism but they got confused
and said mallaphor 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. I like when there's part
where Christoph multi Santi talks about creating a little dysentery
in the ranks, which that one reminds me of one

(02:54):
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 the
scene in the horror movie and he says it juxtaposes
the sacred and the propane. Or there's a part where
Tony Too describes his mom as an alba core around

(03:16):
my neck instead of an albatross. Very good. This is
more of a phrase. But I instantly thought of of
The Big Lebowski when he said he points out the
Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women. Um, the code of
the Corner Brothers paint with this sort of brush of
a lot in their dialogue. I was reading a little
bit about this lip. Basically I was looking for some

(03:38):
more examples of of of malapropisms in the Cohen 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 the dialogue of
wonderful inarticulacy. That's about right now. You'll also another place

(03:59):
you see lot of malapropism is that you'll see it's
sometimes used as part of racial stereotypes. One example that
comes to mind, and you see this listed on various
trope websites, is the 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

(04:21):
were forced movies about about a robot like they become
self aware and 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
and he's this this uh, you know this this uh,
this accent, and he's he just bust out a number

(04:44):
of these and ultimately, you know it's it's kind of
like this idea of the comedic racial stereotype of someone
who doesn't have a great grasp on the English language.
And there are four stumbles into all of these. That's unfortunately,
but the use of melopropisms in fiction does go way
way back, Like Shakespeare used malapropisms a lot. The character
of Dogberry and Much Ado about Nothing famously delivers a

(05:06):
bunch of these and they're great. So dog Berry 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 in him
giving confused orders like um, he when he's trying to
get one of his deputies to apprehend all vagrants, but
instead he says, you are to comprehend all vague ram

(05:28):
men um and 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
had with with with melopropisms, right, because you can sort
of you can have your character fumble into something saying

(05:50):
something a little more articulate than they 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
the nineteenth century, malapropisms have also been known as dogberry
is ums. There was another one I came across that

(06:10):
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 not what I
was bringing up on. On August there was an article
in the Texas Tribune by John Reynolds that reported that

(06:32):
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? If we were
to take that literally, like, what would that even mean?
Uh that 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

(06:55):
it will inject a bizarre metaphor mental image into our
head it 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 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 you

(07:17):
said it out loud. Uh 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 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

(07:38):
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,
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

(08:00):
and 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
I mean. But other times malapropisms have more unique ideologies.
For example, when somebody learns a word or phrase by

(08:20):
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
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

(08:41):
our our own life. Totally. But while malopropisms 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
for them has a very distinct origin in history, and
that origin lies with an Irish set matterist, playwright and
politician named Richard Brinsley Sheridan who lived from seventeen fifty

(09:06):
one to eighteen sixteen. Sheridan wrote a number of successful comedies,
but his seventeen seventy five play called The Rivals introduced
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

(09:30):
one other character the very pineapple of politeness, and at
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

(09:53):
I are. Uh So, So it seems that most usage
of the term malapropism in English actually dates back of
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,

(10:16):
originally from 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

(10:36):
of words like this, you know there. There are some
words that 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 through changes in technology and
science and culture. And we wanted to talk about some

(10:57):
of our favorite stories of these words and explore how
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 words are essentially invented. Um, well, I don't

(11:20):
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. But

(11:43):
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 halfway. I don't know that
there are obviously linguistic inventions. Alright, we're gonna take a
quick break, but we'll be right back. Today's episode is
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All right, So we look to 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?
And we know that most words are not deliberate inventions. Obviously,

(14:03):
the the deep origins of language, that's a massive and
complicated subject, limited in large part 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

(14:24):
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 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

(14:48):
to mention one of these similarities. Like the living organisms
on Earth, many of Earth's languages show signs of having
a common ancestor. We can show signs of comin 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

(15:12):
and formations that many languages separated 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

(15:35):
linguists could track these changes through 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.

(15:57):
I was reading a good article about this by John
Whitfield 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

(16:18):
quote their most important components 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

(16:42):
commonly used words, such as numbers and pronouns, change 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,

(17:05):
and uh for you know, things that would be referred
to very often in everyday speech. It's 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

(17:25):
as a common ancestor and 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.

(17:46):
And to bring it back to English, 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 intry resting fact
from that article, UH a professor of linguistics at New
York University named Gregory Guy talks about the word locks,

(18:08):
which in English, of course means 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.

(18:29):
There are things that are 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

(18:49):
use an analogy for the purpose of the rest of
this episode, which is basically biological evolution versus genetic engineering.
Most new words that enter 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,

(19:12):
we we created a giant scorpion as a government weapon
or something that 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 at the word to

(19:36):
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 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 very common

(19:59):
source of new world words 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

(20:20):
an example of this. Now it's technically a calic that's
sus spelled 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. Other examples of this would be brainwashing or

(20:44):
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 thousand's. Prior to all of this,
or verms were insects of the order uh dermap tira.

(21:06):
Ear wigs probably named because well, there's one theory is
that they have the their hind the 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 course becomes part of the idea of like,

(21:27):
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 wrath 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 I was looking at, I think they will
occasionally you can get one in your ear. I would

(21:49):
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 the brain. We need another phrase, by the way,
that's a that's an unfortunate phrase, because who knows our

(22:10):
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
it's not just interesting terms like earworm right. Tons of

(22:32):
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 exist in English today. But tons of other
words in English come from other languages. So here's one

(22:53):
that I was just thinking about. What do you call
the album Black Sabbath by the band Black Sabbath, on
which the song blacks Sabbath appears. It sounds like a
trick question. I think the answer is Black Sabbath. It's
the eponymous album, right, yeah, eponymous, 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

(23:16):
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 Germanic roots, because the vast majority of
English words at this point are borrowed. By some estimates,

(23:38):
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 pollination here is the Norman conquest of
England in the eleventh century, where Norman French suddenly became

(23:58):
the language of govern ment in 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 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

(24:21):
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 the ones with administrative authority. So uh, you get
like buy and purchase by from the old English, purchase

(24:42):
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 idea that that or more of the language is
just words that come from other languages. It it kind
of creates this stone soup sort of scenario for English itself,

(25:06):
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
European languages, meaning that so while you know, modern English
has all these words that come from the French lineage

(25:27):
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
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 they're both essentially

(25:49):
retellings of the Odyssey or the retellings 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. I like that. So another common
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

(26:12):
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
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

(26:33):
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 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

(26:55):
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 Macavelli, and that really is completely cut off
from the original concepts. There's a good malapropism of Machiavelli,
like Theranos, where where somebody's like, that's what Prince Macchiavelli said,

(27:19):
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. 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,

(27:40):
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 that a great source of new
words in this sort of natural evolution version is back formation.

(28:02):
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 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

(28:25):
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 he terminates? Right? 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

(28:47):
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 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

(29:07):
spelling that end with e er like poker, he 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. 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.

(29:28):
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. And this would be
the noun that worked as a singular or a collective,

(29:48):
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
sometime in the seventeenth century that peace must be the
plural word for the singular P, and then the word

(30:10):
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. Another one
that I really like. How about truncation, also known as

(30:31):
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 also see stuff
like bicycle and bike, rhinoceros and rhino, or brother becomes

(30:56):
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 I like to bust it out for groans now
and again never pay for la pizza. Man. Uh. Here's

(31:16):
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 this particular podcast as infotainment, which

(31:39):
is of course a combination of information and entertainment. So
you got a lot of 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 new approach. It needs a new title
and needs a new a new word for this concept.

(32:00):
In a great way to create it is to just
crash two things together and see how they fit. Are
you not in photang? Okay? One more natural source of
new words on amotopeia. This is what we call it
when a word is formed by sounding like the thing
it's referring to. So plink honk, hiss, the word imitates

(32:20):
the sound of the concept. I was trying to think,
do we form new on amotopias this? It seems like
all the ones I can think of have been around
for a while. Maybe we formed 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 ping you about that later.

(32:41):
So originally an automotopia from the nineteenth century, this would
you 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
net work computer user. Yeah. Um, And I would be

(33:03):
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 uh some
examples of sort of modern lingo, and perhaps yeat is

(33:25):
an example. I'm not 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 a cup of

(33:48):
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 an actual sound. God,

(34:11):
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, all right, 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. Conquer your New Year's resolution to

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we've been looking at ways that words arise in language
without being intentionally invented. When they rise through the process

(37:18):
that's more akin to biological evolution. But what about when
we want to Frankenstein some words just like make him
in the lab um. So start 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,
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

(37:41):
sevent 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
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.

(38:05):
But the letter was dated January seventeen fifty four. And
despite the magical delight of serendipity as a concept, I
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

(38:25):
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
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

(38:46):
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
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,

(39:09):
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
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

(39:30):
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,
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

(39:52):
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
not intended by the agent. Yeah, like when you run
into an old friend at a subway on a subway
ride and you think this is exactly like a one
eyed donkey eating grass on one side of the road.

(40:14):
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, in the course of trying to
do one thing, especially if that thing is foolish or misguided,
you actually accomplish something different and good. It's like the
foolishness of the original errand that makes something especially serendipitous.

(40:37):
But according to a post that excerpted from this letter
in the Paris Review, the adjective form of the word
serendipitous was not recorded until nineteen three, So that's a
pretty big span 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

(40:58):
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
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,

(41:20):
you're more likely to assume that it's derived. Two different
parts of speech already exist, right, that you're not making
them up when you say them, Whereas when a word
is 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

(41:40):
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.
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

(42:02):
an article in The New Republic by David Crystal that's
all about terms for drunkenness in English. A lot of
these are forgotten uh. And this term comes from Walpole.
The term is mucky bus, 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.

(42:22):
M bus uh sounds a little bit like sucky bus too,
so it has this kind of like demonic uh quality
to it as well of the of the will being overpowered.
Would you believe that this word comes from a dinner party,
So it's an anecdote that Walpole shares in a letter
to George Montague on April seventeen fifty six. Walpole says,

(42:44):
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
it was Irish for sentimental, Crystal writes quote. The mock

(43:05):
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 I'm gonna do my best with an Irish word.

(43:26):
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 queen
yuck uh, and it means sentimental, ye, I should say.
Crystal's article also mentions a bunch of other terms for drunkenness,
including my new favorite uh. Not a loan word, not

(43:49):
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 fitting. I went
to the Black Sabbath and I became Simon bell Gal.
Thinking about serendipity though, actually got me on the subject
of another invented word that I really like. That comes

(44:10):
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 remembers that. So a deepity is a
special kind of equivocation. And of course equivocation is a

(44:34):
word or phrase that's used in two different ways to
a misleading effect. So you might say, like, um, why
would you read all the arguments for and against Dinnett'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 know. It hinges on two different meanings
of the word argument. In one sense, an argument is

(44:56):
just explaining why you think something's true. In another sense,
it means like angree 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 be interpreted as true and utterly trivial or

(45:16):
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,
in which case this statement is true, but it is

(45:37):
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
to say, on burto Echo wrote something about or I

(45:58):
can't remember you wrote it or quoted it about some
uh some some treatment on the on the rose, 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 the likely so,
but yeah, it was it was from I want to say,

(46:19):
it was from the introduction or the uh 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 the line

(46:40):
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
on Breaking Bad, different story, entirely right. In fact, love

(47:04):
is just a word is a great example because you
can make tons of deepities with the X is just
a why 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.
So it hinges on two different understandings of the word theory.

(47:25):
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 is patently false. Yeah it does. That
statement does tend to hinge on misunderstanding of what theories
are and what role they play in our understanding of

(47:46):
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 nothing to do

(48:06):
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 could mean one
of of two, just dramatically different ideas, and the sense
in which it is obviously true doesn't really mean anything

(48:26):
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

(48:46):
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 Originally, Dinn't 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

(49:07):
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,

(49:29):
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. Yeah.

(49:52):
You often see this in that like the names of
fictitious characters. Um. Part of this is is we've been
on a 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 and

(50:16):
sounds like the the the individual it is. It hisses
like a Slytherin. Yeah, slyther In 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 that have some

(50:38):
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

(50:58):
thinking about it in my head. It deepitty, the itty
part of it somehow sounds like the concept to me
what brings to mind itty biddy. It brings them on 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

(51:20):
ety biddy 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, ittie biddy, I don't know. Yeah,
deepitty just in terms of in examples of of invented terminology. Uh,
this is what I was thinking about recently, psychonaut because

(51:43):
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 means
star sailor or cosmonaut, universe sailor. And of course you

(52:05):
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 Junger
used it in nineteen in the nineteen seventy and it

(52:29):
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. Lily or
Terence mckinna, people who were explorers in the realm of
the mind. Yeah yeah, but also yeah, but also drawing
in that sort of astronaut motif of one of one

(52:50):
who goes out by going in and then Joe, I
know you want to discuss uh, the fagomizer. Oh right,
this comes from This is one of our favorites. It's
come up on stuff to bully your mind a lot. So.
The thagomizer is something that was coined as a joke
in a Gary Larson cartoon. It refers to the arrangement
of spikes on the tail of a stegasaurus. Uh, and

(53:12):
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 a slide
of one of these things and says, now, this end
is called the thagomizer, after the late thag Simmons, which
is wonderful. Yeah. So so this was eventually picked up

(53:33):
by actual paleontologists who found this hilarious because prior to this,
you didn't have a name for the spiked tail. It
is just the spiked tale of a stegosaurus 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, we have thag. Thag
is the name of the caveman victim of the dinosaur. Right,

(53:55):
you've got your proper down there, right, And but then
we come to amiser 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 words that themselves end in um,

(54:17):
like atom and then we get atomizer. So where does
the arm come from? A thagom eiser. The eiser 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 uh atomologize here, Uh it
is just an old suffix, like a long established suffix

(54:38):
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. Thagomizer, if we

(55:00):
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 it
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? Oh? Yeah, I mean I think
it's used in scientific publications. Well that sounds good enough

(55:23):
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 fagomizer, even though it's just kind of
a distorted echo of actual language. Unfortunately, I think we're

(55:46):
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.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Invention, find us wherever you find podcast, wherever

(56:10):
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If you go to invention pod dot com, that'll shoot
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But you will find us all over the place wherever
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(56:32):
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