[.ca] Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success (ISBN 061813008X)

Words, words, words...:
Want to make your mark on the world? Coin a new word. Just follow the rules set down by Allan Metcalf in Predicting New Words and you'll be well on your way. Along the way, he discusses the origins of newish words and phrases like "notebook PC" and "weapons-grade" signifying anything of as well as tried and true ones like "OK" and "moonlighting," examining them and coming to conclusions about what makes a word gain universal acceptance. Predicting New Words is a fun read for those who are interested in words and their history (as well as their future). Metcalf's prose style is simple and easy to read and his transitions are smooth, making each dissection blend into the next. He goes into what is likely to make a word accepted and discusses how some words simply ache to be coined because they keep cropping up in separate instances over time by people who were unaware that anyone else had ever used the word before. In the back of the book is an appendix listing the Words of the Year as chosen by the American Dialect Society, along with descriptions as to what makes them special. Words like "Y2K," the "e-" prefix regarding the Internet, "9-11" as signifying the events of September 11, 2002; all of these have been chosen as Words of the Year for their prevalence and usefulness. Metcalf also proposes some words that are floating around now and puts them to the test using his "FUDGE factor" to decide whether they will be around in 40 years. All in all, Predicting New Words in an insightful and engrossing read, and I recommend it to anyone who gets a kick out of words.

Word Up!:
By Bill Marsano Take heed: This enjoyable and informative book is those who love words and ingenuity; all others stay clear. Author Allan Metcalf, professor of English and executive secretary of the American Dialect Society proposed in 1990 that--just as Time magazine had its Man of the Year--the ADS should elect a New Word of the Year. Done and done! This book looks at the winners (and many others) and what became of them; it encourages readers to create new words of their own devising and suggests criteria for success. And success has been mixed, not only for ADS honorees but for other new words (officially called 'neologisms'). For example, my own creations. I produced "oldveau riche" a dozen years ago, but seldom have opportunity to use it. Currently I'm struggling to popularize "e-dress," which is certainly more efficient than "e-mail address." The first ADS winner, "bushlips" (for insincere political rhetoric), stemmed promisingly from President George W. Bush's "Read my lips: No new taxes," but, like Bush's promise, it went nowhere. "Frankenfood," a recent American coinage for genetically modified food, is popular only in Britain. "Scofflaw," Metcalf says, was selected in 1923 from 25,000 contest entries. It's used for people who ignore parking tickets but was created specifically for illegal drinkers during Prohibition, and it was thought to carry such a sting that it would shame them into reform. Fat chance! Metcalf discusses other semi-successes. Gelett Burgess invented the very useful 'blurb' and 'bromide,' but their were supplied by others. Lewis Carroll invented lots of neologisms that remain pleasing (e.g., "'twas brillig, and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe . . . .") but are so obscure no one uses them. The champion failure would seem to be Rich Hall, said to be a comedian, who in the 1980s published several paperback books full of "sniglets"--words, he said, that don't exist but should. The examples cited by Metcalf show why they've all disappeared: They're desperate, useless and ruthlessly unfunny. Shakespeare, Metcalf says, is the all-time champion. Words and usages he produced four centuries ago are still in common use; his instinct for the right word at the right time was uncanny. Not so mine. A couple of years ago I came up with 'three-wuh' in the hope of getting around 'www' which, as someone else had noted, is the only word to have three times as many letters as it does syllables. Fat chance again: www itself has almost disappeared because, being at the head of web address, no one needs to say it any more--or bothers to. So, creative readers, buy this book and study it. Once you and your neologisms had almost no chance of success unless you wrote for newspapers and magazines. and were thus able to spread them around. But now you have the internet to spread the word, as it were. Use (and explain) your neologisms often in e-mails--which should be sent to everyone for whom you have an e-dress. Professor Metcalf included.

They have a word for it...:
Why do some coined words catch on and others not? Why do some catch on quickly and others burn out equally quickly? As someone who works with word puzzles, I was intrigued by these questions: we like to keep puzzle vocabulary up-to-date, but at the same time make sure that our entries are generally known so as not to frustrate the solver, not always an easy task. Metcalf presents a well-written, jargon-free analysis of his theories on this, including a historical perspective. I found it fascinating, and my copy has already started circulating amongst my coworkers.

Our Word Future?:
Allan Metcalf's Predicting New Words is a very good book on how new words enter our language. Metcalf's emphasis is on why some new words make it and other new words die soon after birth. Metcalf is something of a scientist of neologisms, using a modified version of Dr. Virginia Apgar's new baby human scale to judge if new baby words will thrive in the world of language. Metcalf applies his science to old new words and is even brave \oor foolish\c enough to use his FUDGE scale on some new new words. Metcalf seems to be very aware of the contingencies of history and that some unseen event could send a word that seems dead on arrival into our dictionaries for years to come. I think the best example of how history might be unkind to one of his predictions involves the fashion-related word szhoosh. Metcalf gives szhoosh a 4 out of 10 and predicts that szhoosh is "not likely to step out from behind the window glass." Mr. Metcalf could not have foreseen the popularity of the TV program "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy," where fashion guy Carson Kressley uses the word szhoosh \oas in 'let's szhoosh the shirt up by rolling up the sleeves'\c at least once an episode. This could bump the Frequency and Diversity of users scores from zeroes to ones or twos and take szhoosh from a 4 to as high as an 8. I enjoyed reading \oand arguing with\c Allan Metcalf's ideas in Predicting New Words and give it a 4 out of 5.

New Words and Their FUDGE Factors:
If you feel yourself just one person in a sea of humanity who will be unremembered by future generations (and most of us are indeed going to be forgotten), and you'd like to claim just a little bit of immortality, you might coin a word that gets used by lots of people and then enters the dictionaries. That's what Paul Lewis did. He's a humorist and English professor, and his new word is one of the many reported in _Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success_ (Houghton Mifflin), an amusing new way to look at new words by Allan Metcalf. Every dictionary which lists Lewis's coinage "frankenfood" and goes to any detail on its etymology will have to list him as the inventor (author?) of the word. "Frankenfood," meaning genetically modified comestibles, is a clever, funny new word. It gets its point across clearly, and will probably be around as long as genetically modified food itself is. Score a big one for professor Lewis, but beware: he has subsequently tried coining other new words, some of them seemingly clever and useful, but none of them have caught on. Metcalf's book tries to show why some new words catch on and why some don't, and how to make predictions. Maybe his prediction system is quite good; we will have to wait a couple of generations to see what words stick or fall away as it predicts, but even so, this is a fascinating look at how words come into being. It is surprising that so many new words are created every day. You might even make a few yourself, like President Bush does; he comes up with words like "misunderestimate" rather frequently, but it isn't surprising that a lot of other people have come up with that one, all on their own, too. Often people perceive a need for a word and want to invent one to fill that need. This seldom works to make a lasting word. For a few decades we have been pondering replacements for "boyfriend" and "girlfriend," since older people are doing a lot of dating these days. It would be nice to have a word that meant "he or she" so that one wouldn't feel pressed to go for the ungendered but ungrammatical plural "they" as in "If anyone wishes to leave, they may do so now." As the millennium rolled over, we wondered if after leaving the nineties, we would be entering the "aughts" or "naughts" or "oh-ohs," but the decade still has no agreed-upon name, and maybe we will have to wait for the twenties for an easily namable decade. Words do not rush in to fill all gaps. But many of the new words here have surprising stories. "Scofflaw," though it sounds like something Shakespeare could have used, was invented in a contest in 1924. A member of the Anti-Saloon League offered a $200 prize for a word to mean "a lawless drinker, menace, scoffer, bad citizen, or whatnot." The word was widely publicized, and became immediately popular, although the original aim to deter such scofflaws seems to have failed. Flashy words don't tend to last as well as the unobtrusive ones; in this way, an evolving language is something like an evolving jungle, with the fittest surviving. Since the American Dialect Society still is picking Words of the Year, Metcalf has proposed a rule that will more accurately predict a word's success. It is the word's FUDGE factor, an acronym of "Frequency of use" (popularity), "Unobtrusiveness" (seems like something we already know about), "Diversity of users and situations" (whether it is used by people in many different arenas), "Generation of other forms and meanings" (how fertile it is in creating derived forms), and "Endurance of the concept" (whether the thing it describes stays around so you need the word to describe it). This is all well and good, for a professional word prognosticator, but the rest of us can enjoy this new way of looking at our complex and amusing language, with many interesting examples, presented in an original book.