{"id":264266,"date":"2008-08-27T15:00:35","date_gmt":"2008-08-27T15:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2008\/08\/27\/neologisms\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:29:53","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:29:53","slug":"neologisms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2008\/08\/27\/neologisms\/","title":{"rendered":"Neologisms"},"content":{"rendered":"

This isn’t related to international literature per se, but Erin McKean’s Boston Globe<\/i> column about what makes a word real<\/a> is very interesting. And, maybe, tangentially related to issues translators face. (OK, it’s a stretch, although freeing themselves to come up with new words when necessary, could benefit some translations.)<\/p>\n

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Funner. Impactful. Blowiest. Territorialism. Multifunctionality. Dialoguey. Dancey. Thrifting. Chillaxing. Anonymized. Interestinger. Wackaloon. Updatelette. Noirish. Huger. Domainless. Delegator. Photocentric. Relationshippy. Bestest. Zoomable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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What do all these words have in common? Someone, somewhere, is using them with a disclaimer like “I know it’s not a real word . . .”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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There’s no good reason for the “not a real word” stigma. They all look like English words: they’re written in the roman alphabet, without numbers or funny symbols. They’re all easily pronounced — not a qwrtlg or a gxrch in the group. From a purely functional point of view, they act like words: relationshippy in the sentence “Just come to the conclusion that boys don’t like talking about relationshippy things” behaves in exactly the same way that an adjective like girly would. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As she points out, existing in a dictionary isn’t enough, nor is frequency, spellchecker recognition, frequency, or appearing in print. The real point of her piece though is to eliminate the “I know it’s not a real word” sentiment:<\/p>\n

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Furthermore, those same writers are giving up one of their inalienable rights as English speakers: the right to create new words as they see fit. Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I’m vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I’ve ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that fetch is now the word I want to use to mean “cool.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So, last week I was talking with David from Idlewild books<\/a> (an store whose kickassery nature I want to write about in more detail soon) about the need for a word to describe when a great idea gets all f’d up due to incompetence, poor execution, whatever. It happens all the time (I can think of five examples that I encountered over the past couple days) and it would be really useful to have a word to identify this . . . Any suggestions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This isn’t related to international literature per se, but Erin McKean’s Boston Globe column about what makes a word real is very interesting. And, maybe, tangentially related to issues translators face. (OK, it’s a stretch, although freeing themselves to come up with new words when necessary, could benefit some translations.) Funner. Impactful. Blowiest. Territorialism. Multifunctionality. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,14506],"class_list":["post-264266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":357066,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264266\/revisions\/357066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}