Chapter 10: Language
10.2 Words As Toys
Another wonderful aspect of words is that they are toys that can be played with. Going to school for too long and being taught the “proper” words for things may blind you to the fact that language has always been fluid, creative, and personal. Perhaps your family has come up with special words or phrases, or your friend group has “inside jokes” that are encapsulated with a phrase that makes you laugh but that others don’t understand. In the television series Reservation Dogs, for example, a group of teens uses the words “stoodis” and “skoden” as shortenings of “Let’s do this” and “Let’s go then.” Puns, and the habit of responding to a bad pun by groaning, date back to ancient Rome. You may not be aware that serious scholars have devoted time and energy to dissecting the pun “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana” (a phrase with its own Wikipedia page).
Although it may annoy language purists, there is a long history of people turning verbs into nouns (such as “That’s a big ask”) and nouns into verbs (“This will impact your decision”). William Shakespeare contributed 1,700 words to the English language (or was at least the first person to record them). Another copious contributor was Cab Calloway, who in 1938 compiled the terms he heard from Harlem musicians into the Hepster’s Dictionary. Some of the terms now sound outdated (“cogs” for sunglasses or “mash me a fin,” meaning “lend me $5”), but many survived (“stache” = to hide away; “corny” = old-fashioned or stale; “beat” = tired). Since then, the stream of slang words joining the language has not stopped, with some experiencing brief popularity before they become dated, and others achieving formal recognition (such as “rizz,” which was named the 2023 Oxford Word of the Year).
Some brand names have become generic. If someone asks for a band-aid, most people don’t reply “Sorry, I only have Curad brand bandages, not Band-Aid brand.” Other words began as initials (acronyms): did you know, for instance, that “scuba” stands for “Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus”? When a new disease swept the planet in 2020, the World Health Organization had no trouble coming up with an easily-pronounceable two syllable word for it, COVID, which many people didn’t realize is just an abbreviation of “COrona VIrus Disease.” If that was so easy, why are so many other disease names so difficult?
Given the ease with which many new words join the English language, it’s curious that other words struggle to gain that status. The most notable example is the lack of a gender neutral singular pronoun in English, to get around having to specify “he” and “she” or use the inhuman “it.” A new word would make life easier, averting the need to use constructions such as “he or she” (or in writing, “s/he”) or the plural “they,” which is potentially confusing. Yet none of the proposed new gender neutral terms — including “tey” (Miller & Swift, 1971), “xe” (Rickter, 1973), “per” (Piercy, 1979), “ze” (Creel, 1997), “sey” (Rogerson, 2013), and “eh” (Steinback, 2018) — have caught on widely. Scholars can speculate as to why, but it seems to have something to do with how politically charged gender and identity are, and the fact that some words have become battlegrounds.
BOX 10.2A: We Don’t Have A Word For That
It’s intriguing to learn about the differences between languages and what they have words for. Sometimes English speakers become so fond of words from other cultures that we borrow them untouched, such as “schadenfreude” (the wicked joy you feel from other people’s sadness or misfortune) or “apartheid” (a policy of separating races). Given how much English has taken from languages around the world, and how big the English vocabulary is (the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is 21,728 pages long), it can be surprising to realize how many things lack an English word.
Relationship terms: If you have ever tried to decipher what “third cousin once removed” means, you may get the impression that English must have words for all relationships. But you may also discover that many relationships have no name, or at least require a lot of hyphens. For example, imagine a married couple, Leslie and Pat. Leslie’s mother is Louise, who Pat can refer to as “my mother-in-law.” Pat’s mother is Jo, so Leslie calls her “mother-in-law.” But what is the term for the relationship between Louise and Jo? They will probably see each other repeatedly over the years, and may develop a strong relationship, but if we had to give it a name, it would be “my daughter-in-law’s mother.” Other relationship terms, like “friend” or “partner,” are used to represent a wide variety of different kinds of relationships, sometimes leading to confusion. In the film American Beauty, a gay couple introduces themselves to a neighbor using the phrase “And this is my partner, Jim,” to which the neighbor replies, “You said you’re partners, so, uh, what’s your business?” In the 1970s, the U.S. Census Bureau needed a term for romantic partners who are living together but not married, and devised “POSSLQ”: Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters.
Someone who has lost a child: Author Jay Neugeboren, in his 1976 book An Orphan’s Tale, pointed out a deficiency in the English language and suggested a reason why: “A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.” Is awfulness a valid reason not to name something? It doesn’t seem so, since we have names for so many awful things like killing your own mother (“matricide”), so that hole in the lexicon is puzzling.
Giving someone something to drink: If someone needs food, they feel hungry, so you feed them. If someone needs liquid, they feel thirsty, so you _____(?) them. If they are a horse, you can “water” them, but for humans, why don’t we have a liquid equivalent for “feed”?
Poignant emotions: English has many words for emotions, but as author John Koenig proved in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (2021), there are many more without names, and he offers names for hundreds of them. Examples include “Foreclearing: the act of deliberately refusing to learn the scientific explanations of things out of fear that it’ll ruin the magic,” and “Bye-Over: the sheepish casual vibe between two people who’ve shared an emotional farewell but then unexpectedly have a little extra time together, wordlessly agreeing to pretend that they’ve already moved on.”
BOX 10.2B: We DO Have a Word For That
In contrast to the vocabulary gaps in Box 10.1, word nerds can delight in hidden gems that we do have a word for in English, such as:
Defenestrate (dee-FEN-uh-strate): to throw someone out of a window. Did this happen so often that someone decided we needed a name for it?
Antepenultimate (an-tee-pen-UL-ti-mut): third-to-last. December 29 is the antepenultimate day of the year.
Akimbo (ah-KIM-bo): holding your arms like this:
To “bat” your eyes: to flutter your eyelashes up and down in a flirtatious manner.
Psithurism (SITH-yuh-rizz-um): the sound of wind rustling through leaves.
Callipygian (kal-i-PIJ-ee-an): having beautifully shaped buttocks.
Sesquipedalian (ses–kwee-pe-DAY-lee-an): with origins in “sesqui” (one and a half) and “ped” (foot), and referring to things that are a foot-and-a-half long, the word then came to mean words that are really long. In other words, “sesquipedalian” is a sesquipedalian word.
As you might be able to guess, I’ve been collecting words like this for most of my life. The challenge is figuring out how to use them without getting myself defenestrated for sounding too sesquipedalian. Fancy vocabularies don’t make you too many friends.
