53
CONTENTS
2
T
HEM
k
Why is it that there never seem to be enough words in the dictionary to
cover everyone we dislike? To make things worse, new kinds of dislik
-
able people keep cropping up.
IF THESE ARE ANSWERS, WHAT WAS THE
QUESTION? 59
THE WAY THEY DO THE THINGS THEY DO 63
MAIM THAT TUNE 66
3
T
HE
M
ATERIAL
W
ORLD
k
73
Most of the dictionary words that enter our language nowadays are
names for things. But the captured fugitive that’s a name for a thing is
relatively rare. Come marvel at some of these hitherto unnamed rarities.
ANTIQUES OR NOVELTY ITEMS? 79
JUST ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER 84
WHAT ARE THESE WORDS? 91
4
T
RIBULATIONS
k
101
Granted, the annoyances in this chapter are petty. But that’s no reason
to suffer them in silence.
A LITTLE CROP OF HORRORS 107
A GALLERY OF BAD BEHAVIOR 117
iv
CONTENTS
5
M
AY
W
E
H
AVE A
W
ORD
?
k
127
People who start thinking about words are likely to find themselves,
pretty soon, thinking about words about words. You never know: it
might even happen to you.
TWELVE OF ONE, A DOZEN OF THE OTHER 132
SIX GRIZZLED FUGITIVES 142
6
O
DDS AND
E
NDS
k
155
This is where the word fugitives go if they don’t fit into any of the other
categories—just so we’re clear about what the organizing principle is
here.
WHICH ARE WHICH? 160
ACCURATELY QUOTED 167
I
N
C
ONCLUSION
: K
EEPERS
177
What sets a keeper apart from a discard? And do keepers have a future
as dictionary words? Sorry, no—this has all been an elaborate fantasy.
Here’s why.
B
IBLIOGRAPHY
189
v
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
B
OOKS
B
Y
B
ARBARA
W
ALLRAFF
C
REDITS
C
OVER
C
OPYRIGHT
A
BOUT
T
HE
P
UBLISHER
INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE BEGINNING
I
magine being the first person ever to say anything. What fun
it would be to fill in the world with words: tree, dog, wolf, fire,
husband, wife, kiddies. But putting names to things quickly gets
complicated. For instance, if I call my husband husband, what
should I call my friend’s husband? Just for the sake of argument,
let’s say he’s a man. So is my husband still my husband, or is he, too,
a man? Or maybe he could go by both names. If we let him have
more than one name, he can also be a fa t h e r —and a hunter-
gatherer.
And, say! Let’s make up words for actions, as well as things:
The tree grows new leaves. The dog runs—he runs away from the
wolf and toward the fire. You know what? This pastime has possi
-
bilities.
1
WORD FUGITIVES
All right, I’m sure it wasn’t literally like that. But before the
beginning, there weren’t any words. And now, obviously, there are
millions of them, in thousands of languages. Our own language, if
we count all the terms in all the specialized jargons attached to En
-
glish, has millions of words. Between prehistory and the present
came a long period in which people who didn’t know a word for
something usually had no way of finding out whether any such
word already existed. For example, suppose you wanted to know a
plant’s name—maybe the name of a particular one that could be
used medicinally as a sedative but could also be lethal in high
doses. If you asked around and nobody knew what it was called,
you’d have little choice but to make up a name. Let’s say hemlock.
Why hemlock and not some other word? Nobody knows anymore.
The Oxford English Dictionary says hemlock is “of obscure origin:
no cognate word is found in the other lang[uage]s.”
William Shakespeare lived and wrote during that long, lin-
guistically benighted period. Nonetheless, he managed to express
himself pretty well in writing. Shakespeare is thought to have been
a prolific word coiner. Besmirch, impede, rant, and wild-goose chase
are a few of the more than a thousand words and phrases that he
evidently added to our language. His coinages tend to be more a
matter of tinkering or redefining than of plucking words out of
thin air (or ayre, as Shakespeake spelled the word in the phrase into
thin air, in The Tempest). For instance, smirch was a verb before
Shakespeare added the prefix be- to it. Impediment, derived from
Latin, was in use in English for at least two hundred years before
2
INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE BEGINNING
Shakespeare came up with impede. But as scholars of Shake-
spearean English acknowledge, only a limited amount of writing
survives from Shakespeare’s day apart from his own. Many words
whose first recorded use appears in one of Shakespeare’s plays may
have been familiar to Elizabethan-era conversationalists. Or
maybe in conversation Shakespeare coined many more words than
we know—but because he didn’t write them down, they’ve been
lost to history.
The English language kept swallowing up, digesting, and
drawing energy from other languages’ words. As English grew,
word lists of various kinds were compiled and circulated. For in
-
stance, there were lists of “terms of venery”—words of the kind
(“a pride of lions,” “a murder of crows,” “a gam of whales”) in
which An Exaltation of Larks, by James Lipton, has latterly spe
-
cialized. The earliest still in existence, The Egerton Manuscript,
dates back to about 1450. The Book of St. Albans, “the most com
-
plete and important of the early lists,” according to An Exaltation
of Larks, appeared in 1486. The ambitions of language reference
works continued to grow. The first comprehensive English dic
-
tionary, compiled by Nathan Bailey, was published in Britain in
1730. The word copyright hadn’t yet been coined. Samuel Johnson
did a bit of cribbing from Bailey to create his famous dictionary
of 1755—by which time copyright was indeed in use. Still, it took
about another half century for the word to make its way into
Johnson’s dictionary.
In America in 1783, a twenty-five-year-old Noah Webster be-
3
WORD FUGITIVES
gan publishing “spelling books.” Webster’s Spelling Book sold more
than a million copies annually for years—an astonishing number
considering that in 1790, according to the first U.S. census, the to
-
tal U.S. population was less than four million. Far from resting on
his laurels, Webster kept working away until he had finished his
masterwork, the two-volume American Dictionary of the English
Language, published in 1828. From then on out, Americans as well
as Britons had fewer excuses to invent words.
Of course, coining words to meet real needs continued—and
it continues, especially in specialized realms like medicine, tech
-
nology, fashion, cooking, cartooning, online games, and so on.
The world contains many specialized realms. Sometimes what
constitutes a need for a term is subjective. Why do we need myo
-
cardial infarction when we already have heart attack? Physicians
think we do. Why do we need bling-bling when we already have
flashy jewelry? Movie stars and rap musicians think we do. Well,
jargon and slang have been with us a long time. New words coined
to meet needs—objective or subjective, real or perceived—have
been with us since the beginning. The impulse to coin words today
may well be a vestige of the impulse that gave humankind lan
-
guage in the first place.
Jargon, slang, and words coined in all seriousness are not,
however, our subject in this book. If a word is known to hundreds
or thousands of people, most of whom take knowing it as a sign of
kinship with one another, and very few of whom believe they in
-
4
INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE BEGINNING
vented it, then for our purposes it is a domesticated word, a dic-
tionary word, as opposed to a captured fugitive. The distinction
between domesticated words and captured fugitives is a blurry
one, for sure. Some words that have been domesticated thor
-
oughly enough to appear in dictionaries deserve, in my opinion, to
be let go—say, funplex, carbs, and the verb gift. (You probably have
your own, longer list.) Such words should be allowed to scuttle
back to wherever they came from. On the other hand, some ea
-
gerly sought fugitives have eluded capture for decades or even
centuries—for instance, a grammatical and idiomatic word to use
in questions instead of “Aren’t I” (ungrammatical) or “Am I not”
(stilted), and a gender-neutral singular pronoun that could take
over from he or she.
★★★
What exactly is a “word fugitive”? Simply put, it’s a word that
someone is looking for, which other people helpfully try to find or
coin. To explain the idea more cosmically, if words are conceptual
matter, word fugitives are conceptual anti-matter. Word fugitives
are holes in the language that dictionary words have failed to fill.
Tree, dog, wolf, grow, run, and the many thousands of other words
that we can look up are all well and good; they’ve long served us
admirably. But time marches on, and now, in the twenty-first cen
-
tury, wouldn’t it be handy to have a word for the momentary con-
fusion people experience when they hear a cell phone ringing and
5
WORD FUGITIVES
wonder whether it’s theirs? Those of us who’ve left our caveman
past behind might get more everyday use out of a word like that
than we do out of words like cudgel, snare, and leg-hold trap. The
squeamish among us, highly civilized beings that we have become,
might even appreciate being able to put a name to the fear of run
-
ning over squirrels.
And, for once, we can get what we want. Word coining seems
to be ingrained in each of us. Linguists have determined that chil
-
dren don’t simply hear and remember all the forms of all the
words that enter their vocabulary. As soon as children are familiar
with a pattern like I smile, my father smiles, I smiled, my father smiled,
they easily generate I run, my father runs, I runned, my father
runned. They half-hear things and in response coin charming
words like rainbrella and lasterday. Until children learn their irreg
-
ular verbs and acquire a big, all-purpose vocabulary, they’re very
good at spontaneously filling holes in their language. Scientists
have reported that about 40 percent of twins under the age of five
or six (and some close-in-age siblings too) have a private language
they speak only with each other. Surely at least that high a propor
-
tion of families have a few words of private language they use
among themselves.
Some “family words” are, more or less, souvenirs of the fam-
ily’s experiences. Other family words exist to fill holes in the stan
-
dard vocabulary—sometimes holes that many other families have
separately noticed and filled. Lots of people, it turns out, call
nephews and nieces collectively niblings or nieblings or nieflings. I’ve
6
INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE BEGINNING
heard from or read about dozens of them. Many of these people
believe they or someone they know coined their word. Evidently,
niblings, nieblings, and nieflings are coined again and again. But be
-
cause they rarely break out of the spoken language into print, they
haven’t made it into our dictionaries. Thus family words make up
a half-hidden level of language.
The conceptual matter of family words, like that of other
kinds of words, has anti-matter, or word fugitives: meanings for
which we’d all like to have words, and for which people keep coin
-
ing words. What word, for example, describes a grown-up’s
“boyfriend” or “girlfriend”? In cold climates, what might we call
the grubby lumps of ex-snow that cars track into our driveways
and garages? In the case of each of these word fugitives—and
others—many possibilities have been floated, but none has caught
the fancy of a critical mass of English-speakers. So people just
keep asking why there’s no word with that meaning and trying to
come up with one.
★★★
Credit for being the first to neologize publicly on purpose is usu-
ally given to two Englishmen, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, for
their “nonsense verse.” “ ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves / Did
gyre and gimble in the wabe,” Carroll wrote, in his poem “Jabber
-
wocky,” published in Through the Looking Glass, in 1872. Brillig?
Slithy? Gyre? Gimble? Wabe? Carroll (whose non–nom de plume
was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) coined them all.
7
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