Neoteric Vocabulation
Peter, Nick and Fraser mansplain the adoption of new vocabulary for any wordies out there - totes adorbs.
Things mentioned in this podcast:
- Plotkin paper on information theory and language evolution
- Bentz et al on entropy across different languages
- Linguistic determinism
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing new words. So, Nick, new words, lead us in, why are we talking about new words?
Speaker B:I had a lexical crisis a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to work out a word that, I was talking about a level of precision that we were kind of aiming for with a certain analytical approach that we were using. And I couldn't work out what the word, I wanted to say the something or other level of precision. And it was basically meant the aimed for level of precision, but aimed for sounds like a weird word. So I just was trying to work it out. We went through lots of possibilities like, you know, desired or targeted, and none of them were quite right. Because, you know, aimed for doesn't quite mean targeted, because targeted suggests you could be above or below. But this was a kind of thing that we might hit if we get it right, you know. And they were really meant aimed for. Peter came up with a-mired, which isn't a great word, but it means it's a made up word, which means sort of aimed for and desired at the same time. Anyway, that's the backstory. But really, the question is, when new words arise, right? Well, I mean, when do they appear? When do we know that the time is right for a word to appear? And what drives them? Is it demand? Or is it surprise? You're like, someone comes up with a great new word and then goes, that's a thing now. And we all start using it because, you know, it was always there. But now we
Speaker A: Just a few stats. A study in: Speaker C:websites. In the English language. In the English language. Yeah. So quite a lot. But another study from Harvard University in the same year suggested that in general speaking and vernacular, there's around 8,500 new words per year generated. So some of them will get adopted and some of them will fall by the wayside. So the English language stands at around a million words in general use, which is quite astounding. And they reckon that the number of commonly used words have doubled in the previous century. So it's, you know, it's big and getting bigger. That's interesting. That suggests, I don't know, what, technology? I don't know. Well, there are, yeah, they, reading around the subject, not this study, but others, there's an interesting thing that, well, actually, there's two competing schools of thought that actually it's always been like this. And there's always been a highly inventive and fluid use of words. But we've only recently sort of started being able to record and capture much more of what people are saying to each other than before that we've been able to do this kind of analysis to indicate it. So, I mean, I would prescribe personally to that view that humans have always liked playing with language, and they've always liked talking to each other in novel, funny ways. So they've always made up new words. It's just that we've captured more of them, because we've got more digital media now than we've ever had.
Speaker A:Okay. Nick, you got some more stats?
Speaker B:No, just that, apparently, something, so Peter's figure of a thousand new words appearing in English sounds about the same as the number of new words added to the dictionary each year, as far as I can tell, although it's not necessarily clear how many of those are what we might think of as new words rather than, you know, things like new names of chemicals and that sort of stuff. But, yeah, so I think what we're saying is that as soon as a word becomes sort of a new word that people use in speech and so on and so forth, it's not necessarily a new word. It seems to have about a one in four chance of eventually making it into the dictionary. And I think we can consider that the dictionary probably records what is considered settled usage. So, yeah, basically, well, we're talking about an order of a thousand, a couple of thousand of new words a year. So, yeah, so, yeah, I know I have had a look, and I've had a look at some of what sort of, you know, the proximate... Can we categorise them? Yeah, I mean, well, there's words... Yeah, we can. In terms of sort of how they get there, where do they come from? So, there are quite a lot are acronyms. So, I mean, in recent years, that would be something like WTF or LOL or AFK or IRL, which are all words away from keyboard. Oh, God. So... What's the other one you said? IRL or... What's that? In real life. I use that all the time. It's brilliant. So, you know, if we're playing... If I'm playing Minecraft with the kids, I'll say, right, bed IRL in five minutes, which means we're not going to bed in Minecraft in five minutes, which is something you can do. We're going to bed in real life in five minutes. Oh, yeah, I forgot what IRL is. An AFK is a good one because that falls into an example, actually, of kind of these retronyms where, you know, in the old days, AFK was what we were all the time. But now we spend so much time online that it's meaningful to talk about someone being AFK. So, in other words, they're out doing something like making a cup of tea. They're AFK instead of, you know, where they should be, which is in front of their computer screen on a keyboard. So there's acronyms. So the classic examples of those are things like laser and radar and scuba. And also there's various things that are sort of acronyms like amphetamine, which are concatenations of much longer terms. Yeah, I mentioned retronyms. So that's quite an interesting one that crops up. And I think this probably relates to what we might want to talk about, which is, you know, how do we decide it's time for a new word? Retronyms most commonly happen because technological changes come along and create a sort of expand on something we had before. And that thing then needs to be subdivided. So, acoustic guitar. There was no such thing as an acoustic guitar until electric guitars came along. Likewise, an analogue watch. I was watching a film the other day, Hidden Figures, which is about some of the sort of black female engineers who worked at NASA. And they worked in the sort of early 60s. And they were called computers, these people. They were computers. Their job was to go and do. Yeah, that's what they did. They computed stuff. And they weren't called human computers. Nowadays, the idea of a human computer is weird. But for a time, there were human computers and digital computers. And now, of course, we only talk about digital computers. And I think that's something to think about. The fact that we no longer need the human, the digital bit. We just talk about computers. Manual transmissions on cars. Old money, as opposed to just money. Offline, as a thing. You might have an offline meeting. Well, that certainly never used to exist. The safety bicycle, another example of something where we had to add safety to bicycles to contrast with penny farthings. But we no longer do that because there are no penny farthings left. Tabletop games, something I'm fond of. But you now need to say tabletop games to distinguish them from computer games. Don't we call them board games? Tabletop is a more generic term, actually, which includes things like Dungeons and Dragons, fake news, caffeinated coffee, etc. So anyway, there's that back. Retronyms are a really common route whereby new words are invented. Then you get there's also you get things from literature as well. Words that crop up in literature like Grok, cyberspace, Quark, Catch-22, Quixotic, Scrooge, all examples that I found. What's Grok? Grok means to sort of get something. I think it's from Heinlein. I can't remember which book, but Robert Heinlein invented that. And it means to sort of intuitively get something.
Speaker A:Like grok it.
Speaker B:Yeah. So like a new idea, instead of having to struggle with it and think about what it means, you grok it when it just totally fits into place and you get it. It's a good word. And I think people, it means a bit more than just to get something because it means to get it on a kind of deep fundamental level.
Speaker A:I feel you.
Speaker B:Yeah, exactly. Genericization. So that's from products, things like Coke, Xerox, Tweet. Backformations. This is where we take a word and sort of do something to it to create a word which feels like it ought to have existed in the first place. So, for example, a burglar is not someone who burgles, right? That's not what it meant originally. It wasn't like there was a thing called burgling and people who did it, we called them burglars. A burglar was, you know, the name of the person. And we then invented the verb to burgle as a result. Really? Yeah, really. The word resurrection preceded the word resurrect by quite a long time, for example. So resurrect came from resurrection. And that was part of a big massive trend of taking Latin words, Latin nouns and creating verbs from them, which didn't used to happen. Edit from editor. Syringe from syringes, which is where we might call them syringes now, but syringes is the plural of syrinx.
Speaker A:What's a syrinx?
Speaker B:A single syrinx. It's a single one of what you have lots of when you have syringes. But we invented the word syringe because it's more natural for us to singulise. Compounding, very popular. Foot, ball, which I don't know if you're much of a lexicographer, but it comes from foot and ball put together. Forthwith, undercut. There's quite a lot of those. And I think everybody's favourite category of word, right, which is the portmanteau word, which as a portmanteau was a type of travelling case which had two big compartments in it. When you opened it up, you could kind of imagine opening it up almost like a little miniature cupboard and it had two kind of bits in it. So this is two words smashed together to create an exciting new word. And this is where I think most of the words that we think of as new words come from. So brunch, classic example. Everyone loves that one. Brexit, sheeple.
Speaker A:What's sheeple?
Speaker B:Sheeple is like a derogatory term for sort of basic people. No, it's when it's people who basically just do what people tell them to do, follow kind of the prevailing opinions. You know, sheeple. So, yes, it's kind of people and sheep put together. Bootylicious. Jedward. Adorkable. Ramona. Libtard. They're all ones. Now, I think, you know, Ramona is a great one. So, I mean, yeah, I think it's a really good word which, you know, it smashes together, obviously, moan and remainer, but in a way that actually really does seem to work to fit a certain category of person. So, anyway, there we are. So there's a bunch of, I'm not claiming that's an exhaustive list, but there's a bunch of new word types.
Speaker C:Well, there are. I read an article, a Guardian article suggested there are 13 distinct mechanisms that new words are created. I won't go into any more of them. And moreover, they're often formed as a combination of these different techniques. So if you've got 13 different things you can possibly take combinations from, you've got a vast possible sort of mechanisms that can be used.
Speaker B:The tools of the word forger are many. And I think, yeah, I mean, I don't know, my personal, where do we find out about new words? I mean, because when I was certainly back before the internet, it was Viz. For me, it was Viz.
Speaker A:Really? Okay.
Speaker B:Which is for our overseas listeners, a kind of slightly puerile British adult comic, which was always, and it had this, had Roger Melly's profanisaurus in the back, which was for people would send in lots of suggestions for words, nearly all of which were rude. And they were sort of new, but almost all of them were new terms for, you know, having a dump or your wanger or whatever. But they were all, they were all, they were incredibly inventive.
Speaker C:Now what's somewhat superseded by the Urban Dictionary.
Speaker B:Yeah, Urban Dictionary has certainly picked up that mantle. And that's now where you would go to find new words. I myself, I'm an author of a word in Urban Dictionary. Yeah, that's a term actually.
Speaker A:What is, okay, tell us then.
Speaker B:Well, you know how there's clingfilm and there's tinfoil? You've heard of those? Well, I thought it would be cool for tinfoil to be called blingfilm. Why? Well, it's just cool, isn't it? Because you've got clingfilm and blingfilm and it's shiny. It's shiny. Why are you looking at me like you don't know what I'm, it's obvious why it should be called blingfilm. So I thought blingfilm was a really good slang term for tinfoil. But I mean, I have to say it hasn't taken off, but it is on there now.
Speaker A:What's the Urban Dictionary? What's this?
Speaker B:Oh my God. It's a, you know, the internet. Yeah. You know words. I heard my grandkids talking about it. So it's a site which is like, literally, it's kind of, I guess, the first draft of the Oxford English Dictionary. Is it all made up? Is it, you know, is it real? No, no, no, no. A lot of it is definitions of kind of, you would, it would be your first port of call if you hear someone described as, you know, Nang or Dench or something and you don't know what it means. You would go there just to check, to check what people say that word means. So it's a kind of good, I think of it as the first.
Speaker C:It's a democratised dictionary. Anyone can submit words, but by and large, they're words that people use in their own little social groups. So they're active words, but they're not quite met the uptakes featured in a proper inverted commas dictionary.
Speaker B:But one day they will. They'll find their way in there.
Speaker A:So look, I still don't feel we're sort of, we're not quite sort of getting towards the answer of the question that we posed of where does stuff come from. We sort of have.
Speaker B:Well, we've tracked it, the proximate sort of where do words come from and how do they get made? The real question is what affects their take up?
Speaker A:Yeah, like kind of the mechanism almost for stuff, you know.
Speaker B:I suppose what are the underlying forces that cause a word to appear?
Speaker A:Yeah, I haven't heard from Peter for a bit. Peter, anything to add at this point?
Speaker C:Well, I'm not a linguistic theorist, but it strikes me that it must be an interesting social process that goes on when a word is first posited by somebody as to stand for something or explain something or to have as a shortcut to a concept that they've got in mind. It must be that other people find that as a useful thing as well. And then if it sort of meets a certain threshold of usefulness amongst other people it gets used and carried on. So it's got to be sort of, it must be sufficiently sort of concise, conceptually concise that it's easy to spread. And it must fill a gap that other people recognise as existing.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess we're talking about how does something sort of surface and then how does it catch on?
Speaker B: s kind of what's suggested in: Speaker A:I know what you mean.
Speaker B:You know, when you prove something that something was wrong.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:It was there a minute ago. Disproven? Well, no, it's not. It's more dis... it's been sort of... the studies have been, you know, have been kind of overturned. Well, this is a good example of it. This is a good example of what we're talking about. So yeah, but there were studies. So everyone knows this one thing about the Eskimos having loads of words for snow. It's not really true. Discredited. Discredited. Yeah, it's not really true. I mean, if you look for, you know, the terms that in English that we have for snow, you can find more or less all the same terms that correspond to what Eskimos use for, you know, terms Eskimos use. Vice versa, really. Yeah. And there was another study into a Native American group, the Hopi, who it was claimed did not have words for time. And so it was claimed that therefore the Hopi didn't think about time in the same way that, you know, that we do. They don't see it as a kind of linear process. They don't see such thing as past and future. It's all bollocks. Right. I mean, they do. They totally do understand all that. It's just that if you make a literal translation of the grammar, it can look a bit weird, like you would if you made a literal translation of any language, you know, without translating the sense. Anyway, so it's worth mentioning that just because it's worth saying it is discredited. And so, I mean, you know, the kind of intuitive dismissal of this idea is that, you know, there can be such a thing like what just happened, where you know that there's an idea, there's this concept you want to bring out, but you don't have the word for it. Now, if my thoughts were constrained by language, the word discredited would have to come first. Otherwise, I couldn't have the concept without having the word, right? So we know that's not true. And I mean, but having said all that, of course, we do still, you know, attempt to control language. Yes. You know, we sort of ban thoughts in a sense by putting a lid on, you know, language we find unacceptable, you know, what is often called political correctness about.
Speaker A:But also, I mean, there's a really good example at the moment where, you know, we're in the process of going through Brexit one way or another. And the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, keeps referring to the, I think it's the Banner. The Surrender Bill. So, I mean, that kind of trying to control. Yeah, I mean, that sort of that happens. That's quite common. That's quite normal. It's a different kind of thing, isn't it?
Speaker B:Which brings us on to, I think, the weak form, which is to say that our thoughts are influenced by language. And I think that's beyond doubt. And part of the reason that is, is there is a sort of, although you have the denotation of words, there's also, you know, the connotation that they have. So, to describe something as a surrender, you might say literally, well, surrender is simply, you know, the giving up of a particular political ambition. Now, if you were to say that's all surrender is, right, which it kind of is in a literal term, that's what surrender is, then, you know, fine, it would be okay to call it the Surrender Bill. But because surrender has all these connotations to do with sort of cowardice, you're smuggling those in when you use terminology like that.
Speaker A:Yeah, and there's kind of flags of battle, war kind of language.
Speaker B:Yeah. So, anyway, I mean, I think so. So, I think just that relationship between thought and language. Yes, thought comes first, by and large, more or less always. So, thoughts, you know, thoughts are driving the creation of new words. New thoughts equals new words. But it's worth saying that language nevertheless does influence our thought.
Speaker C:I don't know how, I haven't got stats to back this up, but I have a feeling that technical English, be it in whatever domain, seems to be particularly rich for new words. So, as new things are invented or new concepts are created, they need a short handle to kind of put on them so that people can, within that community, can commonly refer to the same thing. So, often you get a long definition of a thing that people sort of feel a nurse to give a short word. An example, a big fan of Scott Manley, who does a lot of space videos. He recently visited the ESA on one of their open days, and he came across the word demisability, which is a word that engineers give as a property of an object of how well it burns up on re-entry. So, high demisable objects burn up very quickly, and low demisable objects, like big lumps of steel or whatever, don't. And what was interesting was the, I think she was either French or Swiss, the engineer he was interviewing about the demisability of things, she seemed to be bemused about this process that the English engineers had come up with for this word. Maybe because in her native language it's not so fluid, but it was seized upon by engineers as being a nice, concise way of describing the properties of objects.
Speaker A:That's a really nice example of a birth of a word, of a new word. And also, I mean, it's something I, you know, I know that here in the UK, we like to think about, especially Latin derived languages as being quite inflexible. And, you know, they're, something we've mentioned before is their institutes of language that they have and all that kind of stuff, which we don't really have in the UK, I think. Look, we're close to being needing to wrap up. There's something I want to ask. Yeah. Before I do, let's round this off a bit.
Speaker B:Yeah, I think, but what we didn't really touch on, this issue of, okay, when is there a demand? Assuming that words are demand driven, Peter's mentioned, it seems like a very plausible hypothesis there to me, which is that, you know, when you've literally invented a new thing, when you have a new area of technology or a new area of science, you are literally for the first time seeing a thing and you have to put a name on it. So it makes sense to me that you would find in science, engineering and, you know, I guess those fields like artificial intelligence, you would expect to find new words appearing there. But I think also, you know, new kinds of technologies when they reach the general public, you know, you've got things like, I guess, social media, smartphone, you know, those words like that, where we need to call a phenomena something. I think, but I think if you think about words as a technology and that what we're trying to do with words is convey information and information in this context is literally the partitioning of the world in a certain way. So if I want to direct your attention to a certain portion of the world, I need to use language to do that, to define the thing I'm talking about, you know, then the bigger the thing becomes, the more of an argument, the more of a need there is to come up with new words to subdivide it. And I think I think that seems that's a very like, you know, with the background with the acronyms, sorry, the retronyms about acoustic guitar and electric guitar. We now have a distinction we need. We want to make because now the space of guitars is so big. We need to start dividing it up, you know. And so, yeah, I mean, I think I feel like that's the that's probably the, you know, if you think of if you think of words as a technology for communication, then their take up, their popularity, the need for their being invented is just like any other technology. Right. So sometimes it will be something entirely new. But when we see it, we go, yeah, that's cool. I want to use that. And not not because it's a fun word, particularly. Really, it's because does it do that job of, you know, subdividing the world in a way that's really useful to communicate? So, yeah, I think I think that's so I would put I would put the take up of new words into the same class of, you know, what makes a product successful? Well, it's a new technology widely adopted. It's the same underlying theory.
Speaker C:So that's describing why words are demand driven. But I think there is supply. There are supply drivers for new words when a word is particularly funny or entertaining or is just rings well to a group of people that can be sort of possibly no need for the word. It's a it's a really I mean, I really like their example. Can you give example? Well, I'm thinking of examples. So classic example, you said you mentioned Shakespeare. He made up words that they didn't need to be worth that. He could have used chosen other words, but he chose to make something that was that was particularly sounded well or rhymed well or fitted well within the prose. So that's an example of a sort of supply driver for a word. But I'm trying to think of my list. I've got a list in front of me. I'm trying to find some that aren't obviously demand driven.
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, it feels to me like it's probably a very much the minority that the word itself is so great that we want to use it.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think there's a minority, but I think otherwise it's quite it's quite a little bit not prosaic, but a little bit too utilitarian in terms of.
Speaker B:I've got one. Gone. Vajayjay for ladies ladies bits.
Speaker A:Where did that come? Well, you've just come up with that.
Speaker B:No, I think it came off something like the only way is Essex. No, you're talking, but it's such a it's such a great work. No, that's it. That's like when you have it, isn't that when you when you kind of have it covered in glitter or something? Yeah, I don't know. But anyway, I think the words like that. I mean, words for our for our rude bits. They are there. They clearly there's no need for them. But we like using them because they're funny, which reminds me actually a friend of mine.
Speaker A:He was years ago. He was in hospital in Poland when we were teachers together. I think it's something to do with his appendix. He was sitting around in hospital. Not much to do. And so he sat there working out how many words he could how many words he knew for like rude bits. Yeah. And that's all he had to do. A lot. He came up with quite a few. I would imagine. Yeah. So Peter, I know you were looking for some words there, but I don't know if you found some great. If not, there's something I want to move on to, which is very close to this.
Speaker C:I haven't got any more examples.
Speaker A:OK, so what I want to ask is this is you can imagine I want to. What's your favorite new word? I don't have one. But well, anyway, if you can, you can either have what's your favorite new word or what's your favorite word? Full stop.
Speaker C:I predicted this question would come up. Oh, well, yeah, it's a very phrase. It is. Yeah. I've got a couple, actually. Right.
Speaker A:Go for it.
Speaker C:OK. I love the much maligned Brexit. Oh, do you? And I like it because it's so emotive and it stands for so much. It comes so loaded with everything. But it's also quite an ugly word.
Speaker A:It is. It's actually, I find it quite mispronounced quite often. A lot of people say Brexit. Brexit? Yeah. It is a G sound. OK.
Speaker C:Yeah. My other favorite is meme. Because it's quite meta. It's about words and ideas and things. But it's a nice. Thanks to Richard Dawkins for it because he coined it. But it's a great. It's just a nice little word to explain. Yeah. A very important concept.
Speaker A:Even though we did a podcast all about memes, I still don't really understand memes. But anyway.
Speaker B:I refer you to our previous podcast. Thank you.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker B:Well, obviously, the concept of a meme is unsuccessful. It's transferring itself to Fraser's brain. So, yeah, something's gone wrong there. Nick. Of recent words, of words that I think I became aware of in about the last year, yeet. What's that? Well, it actually can mean a very wide range of things. But it's generally used to mean to sort of throw something to someone. But more than that. So, like a lot of words, as soon as it gets identified as a thing. But to throw something at someone very forcefully. Almost to kind of really just to get rid of it by chucking it at someone. To yeet it. Who uses this? You can yeet something through a window. You can yeet it across the room.
Speaker A:Have you been hanging out with teenagers in North London again?
Speaker B:People on the Internet use it. So, I'm aware of it that way. But, of course, you know, then immediately gathers a metaphorical usage so that you can, you know, if you yeet someone, you know, you get rid of them as a friend, for example. Or, you know, you can yeet an idea to someone.
Speaker C:So, it's about offloading something forcefully.
Speaker B:Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But, I mean, normally in a certain direction. So, you know, you would specifically. You don't just yeet something. So, it's like foisting. You can't yeet something. You have to yeet something through or at somewhere.
Speaker A:Okay, but do you ever use this in spoken language yourself? Yeah, I do.
Speaker B:Occasionally, yeah. I talk about yeeting things. My son does. My son talks about yeets. Really? Yeeting, yeah. It's something you might do if you were throwing something to someone in Minecraft. You might be yeeting it. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker A:Okay. I actually don't have any other. No, no.
Speaker B:That'll do for now, I think.
Speaker A:I don't have any new words. I don't have any words. But, I do have one thing. It's just a word that I like in another language. Which in Portuguese, they call a hummingbird. They call it a bejaflor, which means a kiss flower. Which I really, really like. But something else. I've got a favorite bit of grammar. Okay. Again, it's not new, but it's something that we use in the UK, but they don't really use in America very much. And actually, you actually just arguably used the US version rather than the UK version, which is, you said, something we didn't cover in the podcast, right? Where more usually, you might say in British English, you would say something we haven't covered. So, we use the present perfect and the past perfect a lot more in the UK than they do in the US. And I think it works really nicely for greater accuracy of what you're talking about at certain points in time. Make sense? Yeah. But it's nothing to do with the US.
Speaker B:No, it reminds me of, there's a popular sort of meme-ish, a kind of thing you only get in memes, really, of adding n't to words. So, instead of saying we didn't cover it, you'd say we covered n't. And yeah, it appears in memes. It's weird you should mention that specifically because, yeah.
Speaker A:Which reminds me, one of my sons, he never says won't. He always says wilt.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, willn't is an old... Yeah. And I quite like it. It makes sense. Yeah. I think in Ireland that's more common to say I willn't.
Speaker A:Yeah. Will you do this?
Speaker B:I willn't.
Speaker A:There's something like that they say in Scotland as well. I can't remember what it is. Anyway. Look, we'll wrap up there.
Speaker B:And instead of saying will, you can say I won'tn't.
Speaker A:True. You're good. You're good. Okay. All right. We'll stop there. That was fun. Thank you very much, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Thanks for listening. And until next time, goodbye.
