Invented Words, Part 1

favorite examples. It's the usually unintentionally humorous misuse or distortion of a word or phrase. So usually it's a word or phrase that sounds like what you mean to say, but is not what you mean to say. For example, Jesus healing the leopards. That's a great one. Yeah, they're often used to comedic effect, like you, like you mentioned and uh sometimes you'll see the latter. This idea of it being a phrase defined is a malla for like

a metaphor. Also it sounds delicious, right though we have to stress that malafor itself is an invented word and potentially uh and I'll appropism in and of itself. Oh, I can see that, like somebody was trying to say malapropism, but they got confused and said malaf right, or or they just intentionally did it. And we'll get into some of the more intentional acts of this as we go. The Sopranos is a great source of very memorable malapropisms.

I like when there's part where Christopher Multa Santi talks about creating a little dysentery in the ranks, which that one reminds me of one about scientology, the the idea that l Ron Hubbard had the philosophy of diuretics. But there's another one in the Sopranos where the character Little Carmines he's talking about seeing in the horror movie and he says it juxtaposes the sacred in the propane. Or there's a part where Tony describes his mom as an

alba core around my neck. Oh, instead of an albatross. Very good. This is more of a phrase. But I instantly thought of the of The Big Lebowski when he's he points out the Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women. Um, the code of the Corner Brothers paint with this sort of brush a lot in their dialogue. I was reading

a little bit about this lip. Basically I was looking for some more examples of of of malapropisms in the Coen Brothers work, and I ran across this Senses of Cinema post by Paul Coughland from several years back, and he described the Cohen Brothers use of dialogue as quote the dialogue of wonderful inarticulacy. That's about right. Yeah. Now, you'll also another place you see a lot of malapropism is that you'll see it sometimes used as part of

racial stereotypes. One example that comes to mind, and you see this listed on various like trope websites, is the Fisher Stevens role in the Short Circuits movies. I've never seen Short Circuit. Well it's probably alright, there's no reason to go back to these, but these were a force movies about about a robot, like they become self aware and it has like a laser cannon on its shoulder and it's like a puppet. Does it do cute robot malapropisms? No,

it doesn't. But Fisher Stevens plays Um, an Indian scientist, uh and and he's this this uh, you know this this uh, this accent, and he's he just busts out a number of these and ultimately, you know it's it's kind of like this idea, the comedic racial stereotype of someone who doesn't have a great grasp on the English language and therefore stumbles into all of these. That's unfortunately, but the use of melopropisms in fiction does go way

way back. Like Shakespeare used malapropisms a lot. The character of Dogberry and Much Ado about Nothing famously delivers a

bunch of these and their grades. So Dogberry is this incompetent night constable and he's supposed to be I think a satire on the amateur police forces of Elizabethan times, and a lot of the humor comes through and him giving confused orders like um, he when he's trying to get one of his deputies to apprehend all vagrants, but instead he says, you are to comprehend all vagram men um and he he tells them to be vigetant. I

beseech you uh. And then there's a great part later where he claims that a bad dude will be condemned into everlasting redemption. Well, there's a. There's fun to be had with with with malopropisms, right, because you can sort of you can have your character fumble into something saying something a little more articulate than I mean to it. Times. Yes, yeah, that's interesting, Like the idea of everlasting redemption is sort of a cool metaphor, even though he just is screwing

up words. But after this character. Actually, since sometime in the nineteenth century, malapropisms have also been known as dog barry is ums. There was another one I came across that I'd never read before. But this is from the real world. So former Texas Governor and U. S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry. He's famous for the for saying the oops when he couldn't remember something. But also, um, that's

not what I was bringing up. On August there was an article in the Texas Tribune by John Reynolds that reported that Perry had been speaking to a crowd and at this event, he told the crowd, quote, we need to look at the states, which are the lavatories of innovation and democracy. Uh yeah, so what what with that? If we were to take that literally, like, what would that even mean? Uh? I think that's the other thing.

The part of it too, is like, even if they're not quite accidentally profound, we can't help a puzzle over it because it will inject a bizarre metaphor mental image into our head and then we're just forced to wrestle with it. Right now, there are also just lots of these people making regular everyday speech. We probably do them all the time. Everybody does them. One of my favorites I ran across was the idea of all the people

who died in the blue Bonnet plague. Uh see. I saw that in the notes, and I didn't even get it until said it out loud now, and that that points out an interesting thing, which is that there there are multiple different ways that people put together malapropisms. Like I was reading a paper by the linguist Arnold Mzuki on classical malapropisms, and Swiki points out that lots of malapropisms are just approximations that come out of our mouths

due to the tip of the tongue effect. This is something we've talked about on Stuff to Blow your Mind before. You can go back and find our episode on that if you google it, I'm sure, but the short version is you are failing to call the correct word from memory, and by accident you employ a similar sounding word instead. You can often hear this, especially in people who may

have been having a bit of alcohol to drink. Like Often words that get swapped start with the same letters or sounds, like you know, uh, this database is a vast suppository of information. I guess actually that wouldn't start with the same sound, but you know, you know what I mean. But other times malapropisms have more unique ideologies. For example, when somebody learns a word or phrase by mishearing it and then never corrects their original misimpression. I

know this has happened multiple times in my life. Blue bonnet plague would probably be a good example here. It suggests that somebody heard somebody talking about the bubonic plague but misheard how they pronounced it, and then just never got corrected on that. Yeah, I think we can all relate to that. We all have examples of that in our our own life. Totally. But while malpropisms are themselves a normal part of speech, they go back into the

mist of history. Everybody does them, and everybody's been doing them for thousands of years. Probably the name we use for them has a very distinct origin in history, and that origin lies with an Irish satirist playwright and politician named Richard Brinsley Sheridan who lived from seventeen fifty one

to eighteen sixteen. Sheridan wrote a number of successful comedies, but his seventeen seventy five play called The Rivals introduced the world to a character named Mrs Malaprop, whom another character says is infamous for delivering words quote so ingeniously

misapplied without being mispronounced. So, for example, Mrs Malaprop calls one other character the very pineapple of politeness, and at another point she refers to an allegory lying on the banks of the nile, which we should point out gets it wrong twice because the nile has crocodiles, not alligators. Oh I didn't even get that one at first. Allegory and alligators. Okay, I think that joke works better on people who are less obsessed with crocodilians than you and I.

Uh so. So it seems that most usage of the term malapropism in English actually dates back to this character in a late eighteenth century Irish play. Maybe all usage of it, but of course the name Mrs malaprop is built out of existing words borrowed from other languages, like uh, there's the there's this expression malapropos, meaning inappropriate, originally from the French, where it would mean something like out of

place or a miss. But from the name of this character we now get the label that we use specifically for malapropisms, words used wrong in this way. And so today we wanted to look at the phenomenon of invented words like the word malapropism. There are tons of words like this, you know. There there are some words that

enter the lexicon from works of fiction or mythology. There are words that enter through deliberate coinage where somebody is trying to create a term for a previously unnamed concept. There are words that enter their changes in technology and science and culture. And we wanted to talk about some of our favorite stories of these words and explore how they differ from other types of words. What what does it take to invent a successful word and are there

any parallels to the invention of a successful piece of technology. Yeah, it's it's a fascinating topic because it's, you know, the world of language. It is a world that is invented, like all wor words are essentially invented. Um. Well, I don't know if I agree with you there, because they all do come from human brains. But I would say maybe some words could be thought of more like features of the human body, that maybe they just emerged from us at some point in history without us trying to

find a word for something. That's true. The more the sort of primal roots of language, which will be discussing. But but still it's it's it's unlike most of the other topics we've done. I don't know if we've done a linguistic episode of invention yet, have we? I don't know that there are obviously linguistic inventions. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. All right, We're back, all right. So we'd like to

start by asking what came before? Uh? And I guess in this case we would have to ask where do words usually come from when they're not being deliberately coined or invented by somebody. We know that most words are not deliberate inventions. Obviously, the the deep origins of language that's a massive and complicated subject, limited in large part to inform speculations since we don't have physical evidence to to discover or to refer to. You know, spoken words

don't leave fossils. Uh, And it's it's too big to address at length today. But by setting linguistics within the timeline of history, especially with the help of written sources, we can learn a lot about how languages change over time and about where words come from. And one thing that I think is extremely interesting is that many scholars have noticed important parallels between the evolution of languages and

the evolution of species. In biology, there are important differences as well, But just to mention one of these similarities, like the living organisms on Earth, many of Earth's languages show signs of having a common ancestor. We can show signs of common ancestry and all living things on Earth by comparing similarities in the genes and observing how those

genes change over time through evolution. Likewise, we can observe similarities in some words and formations that many languages separated over vast distances, seem to share, and observe how those pronunciations and semantics change over time. And in fact, the kind of strange thing is that it was obvious that languages evolve over time from common ancestors. Before it was obvious that plants and animals do this because you know, it was obvious because linguists could track these changes through

written sources from history. They could see for themselves how words and usages and whole languages morphed over the centuries. Charles Darwin actually wrote in The Descent of Man, quote the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through the gradual

process are curiously parallel. I was reading a good article about this by John whit Field in Plos Biology from two thousand and eight called across the Curious parallel of language and species evolution and uh so Whitfield's writing about this subject and uh In addition to common ancestry and changes to words and genes over time, another parallel that Whitfield points out is that quote, their most important components

show the least variation. In biology, this means that genes, such as those involved in the machinery of protein synthesis, so basically something every organism has to do all the time, change so slowly that they can be used to discern the relationships of groups that diverged hundreds of millions of years ago. Likewise, the most commonly used words, such as numbers and pronouns, changed the most slowly. Yeah, I thought

that was really interesting. I mean, other words, you can find other words that seem to persist in fairly stable forms over long periods of time, and they very often are common words. You know, words like for family relationships, words for things like mother and father, and uh for you know, things that would be referred to very often in everyday speech. The whereas it's the more specific terms that may go extinct over time right or face dramatic substitutions.

Uh So, Today more than half of the world's population speaks a language that shares as a common ancestor and extinct language called Indo European. One fun example I was reading about in a Nautilus article from last year by Sevinga Norkiya Zova was about the word honey. So, of course, the word honey is honey in English. In Sanskrit it's madhu, in Russian it's meod. And to bring it back to English, we have mead, an alcoholic drink made out of honey.

In Sanskrit, Russian, and even in English you've got these links that you know, words are still basically very similar. Another interest in fact from that article, UH, a professor of linguistics at New York University named Gregory Guy talks about the word locks, which in English, of course means you know, smoked salmon, you'd have your bagel with locks.

But apparently locks is basically the same word as it was in proto into European eight thousand years ago, where it was probably pronounced locks and it meant salmon like eight thousand years ago. It's interesting to the way both of these examples are foods. There are things that are concepts that that that are for things that we we not only conceive of, but we actually take into our body.

We have such a complete sensory understanding of them. Yeah, that's an interesting point to things that would have been delicious from ancient times. But anyway, based on this biological analogy, I want to use an analogy for the purpose of the rest of this episode, which is basically biological evolution versus genetic engineering. Most new words that enter all language do so through a process more akin to biological evolution. They somehow arise naturally among speakers rather than as you know,

genetically engineered. You know, we we created a giant scorpion as a government weapon or something, you know, the great b movie plot. Um than these genetic engineering projects, and and those would be more akin to what we're ultimately going to focus on the attempts to create a new word on purpose. But let's focus on the biological evolution version first. So when language is evolved naturally, what happens at the word to word level? Where do new words

come from if nobody is trying to coin them on purpose? Well, of course, on our show we've we've discussed plenty of times if you're looking to invent something new, you can always just steal something which has already been invented. And yeah, most inventions are just stealing ideas from other people. Uh, and or maybe making a very slight modification. So a very common source of new word is borrowing from existing languages. Yeah,

and these are also known as loan words. Uh. And one one fun example of this, or at least I find it fun. I don't know your your mileage may vary, but um, earworm is one at all? Here? Well well, well I'm just kidding. That's that's great. Wrong, earworms are an example of this. Now it's technically a calic that's suspelled c A l q u E, which is a specialized version of this in which the original word in

another language is is. It's not just a matter of taking the say that the German word for something and using it. It's directly translating it literal, literally word for word. Other examples of this would be brainwashing or Adam's apple. But with earworm it stems from the German or verm, which may have originated with German operetta composer Paul Linkey, but didn't enter the popular lexicon um until like the early two thousands. Prior to all of this, or verms

were insects of the order uh dermap tira. Ear wigs probably named because well, there's one theory is that they have the their hind wings are kind of ear like. If you fold them out, they kind of look like a human ear. But the more likely explanation is that you have this old wives tale about them crawling into human ears and laying eggs inside your brain, which of course becomes part of the idea of like, what is a song you hear and you can't get it out?

Of your head. It is kind of like a small insect that has crawled in through your ear into your brain. It's like those things in con Yeah exactly, but really, your wigs don't do this, right, No, No, there's no I think they will, uh from based on the research I was looking at, I think they will occasionally you can get one in your ear. I would refer back to our stuff to Blow your mind episode which I think will be rerunning soon, about insects crawling inside of

body cavities. It happens, it can happen, but not not to the degree that wives tales would have you believe. And not eggs in the brain. No, no eggs in the brain. We need another phrase, by the way, that's a that's an unfortunate phrase because who knows our wives really saying this? Yeah, it is. It is sexist terminology. Let's just say old folk beliefs and hearsay old starship captain's tales. Um So. English itself is actually composed of a huge number of words borrowed from other languages. And

it's not just interesting terms like earworm right. Tons of everyday terminology is descended from words that were borrowed into English. Hundreds of years ago. English originally was a West Germanic language, and and these roots or where we get a lot of the origins of common basic short words that still exist in English today. But tons of other words in English come from other languages. So here's one that I

was just thinking about. What do you call the album Black Sabbath by the band Black Sabbath, on which the song black Sabba it appears. It sounds like a trick question. I think the answer is Black Sabbath. It's the eponymous album, right, yeah, eponymous, But of course eponymous, that's a that's a word taken directly from words in Greek. So that's like a Greek loan word. In English, it means to give one's name

to um. And in a way, it's funny to try to list words in English borrowed from other languages, because it would make more sense, really to try to list the words not borrowed from other languages, descending directly from Germanic roots, because the vast majority of English words at this point are borrowed. By some estimates, borrowed words make up about eighty percent or more of the language, and some of these words have been borrowed for a very

long time. Many came from languages like French and Latin hundreds of years ago. The big point of linguistic cross pollination here is the Norman conquest of England in the eleventh century, where Norman French suddenly became the language of government into the ruling class in England. And so this legacy still exists in English today, where you have tons

of words having multiple synonyms for the same concept. Uh. And you have a kind of like every day version of the word that comes from Old English, and then a more formal or official sounding version of the word that comes from the French. So like a holdover from a time when both languages had to exist together at the same time and the same heads and off the same lips. Yeah, and then the French derivative ones were generally the ones in power, the ones with money, and

the ones with administrative authority. So uh, you get like buy and purchase by from the old English, purchase from the old French, where you've got dead versus deceased, dead from the Old English, deceased from the old French. Where you've got wild from the Old English versus savage from the old French. But that's a wonderful point about the idea that that or more of the language is just

word that come from other languages. It it kind of creates this stone soup sort of scenario for English itself, like what what is there that is not something that was brought in to bulk up the recipe. Yeah, that's

a great metaphor. But then ultimately, I mean it gets complicated because both Old English and Old French or Indo European languages meaning that so while you know, modern English has all these words that come from the French lineage of language development, ultimately both languages are thought to come from this hypothetical language a long time ago into European.

So they split off, they formed different lineages, they formed different words that descended from each other, and then at some point in history they crossed and then entered each other. It's kind of like a scenario where if you have like two films that come out and it both essentially retellings of the Odyssey or the retaellings of Baiwol or what have you, like, that's the that's in the genes of the thing. And then but then one sort of

steals from the other, uh like that. So another common source of words ending up in the language is words derived from proper nouns. Something that was once the proper name of a person or a place gets drafted into a common word or phrase. An example here would be platonic. Think of a platonic relationship. Now, once this was understood to refer directly to ideas discussed by Plato, you're talking about the philosopher Plato. Now platonic does not really necessarily

call Plato to mind. It's just an adjective, right, It just means, like, you know, a non sexual relationship, but platonic. One. Another example would be bohemian. Bohemia is a place. It's in the modern Czech Republic. But now the word Bohemian doesn't suggest to people anything about that place. So of course we still have examples of of words that they still have a direct tie to their source, like say Macavellian.

When someone uses maca I don't know. I tend not define examples of people misusing it or using it in a general sense at least yet, but you could well imagine a future or you know, or a usage of Macavelli and that really is completely cut off from the original concepts. There's a good malapropism of machiavellianos where where somebody's like, that's what Prince Macchiavelli said, but I think

he wasn't a prince. He was the prince by Machiavelli actually just thought of another good proper name to common usage, denim. Denim originally is like from day nime. It's like from a place. Oh I didn't know that. Yeah, okay, well, oh well, as long as we're talking about about products, I mean there's of course, Champagne is another example, right, it's a great one where it's officially it's supposed to be tied to the Champagne region, but it is often

just used generically. Now it's just a common now it means bubbly wine. Yeah um yeah. But so another thing that a great source of new words in this sort of natural evolution version is back formation. I love this. Back Formation is when a new word is born when a prefix or suffix is removed from an existing word in order to create a new one. Often because people just assume that these new words already exist because of linguistic cues. So people create a new word thinking it's

already a word, not realizing that it's not one. So here's one that I really like, the verb lace, as in to use a laser. Okay, so this is thinking like, all right, you have the terminator. What's the terminator? Do he terminates? What's the laser? Do lasers the heck out of stuff? Exactly? You've got a fire poker? What do you do with a poker? You poke? So you've got a laser. The surgeon has a laser. What do they do with it? They lace the patient's eye. And this

is a word. Now people use the verb lace all the time. It's a but it is a back formation. The word laser is not like the word poker. Laser is actually an acronym standing for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. But because of its similarity to these other nouns with a similar spelling that end with e er like poker, it got back formed into a verb. And of course this example also shows another new way that words are formed acronyms. Right, laser was originally an acronym.

Now it's not, you know it, Laser is just a word. People don't capitalize that. They don't put periods between the letters. It's just a laser. I was reading about another fun back formation. This is the kind of back formation known as a false singular. And the example here is the English word P, as in p soup. So originally the Middle English word was piece p E a s e and this would be the noun that worked as a singular or a collective, like the word corn, or like

the word wheat. So you could have a bowl of peace, or you could have a single piece kernel. Well, because plural words in modern English end in s sound, people began to assume sometimes the seventeenth century that peace must be the plural word for the singular P, and then the word P was thus created. This type of origin again, this is the false singular. A similar thing would happen if people started assuming that the singular of moose must be moo, as opposed to nieces or of course moose

another one that I really like. How about truncation also known as shortening or clipping. This is when new words are created by cutting chunks out of existing words. So mayonnaise becomes mayo, examination becomes exam, refrigerator becomes fridge, robot becomes bot, application becomes app advertisement, becomes ad. Yeah, we also see stuff like bicycle and bike, rhinoceros and rhino or brother becomes bro or bra. One of my favorites. That also the one that I think it's I find

just so humorous is um when pizza becomes za. I don't know if actual humans use this or if it's just like Ninja turtles, but uh, I like to bust it out for groans now and again, never pay for la pizza man. Uh. Here's another one blending existing words, pretty straightforward. You take incomplete parts of words and smash them together. Breakfast and lunch becomes brunch, Spoon and fork

becomes spork. Podcast itself, we're on a podcast that is a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast, and some would classify this particular podcast as infotainment, which is of course a combination of information and entertainment. So you got a lot of fun a portmanteau from hell. Yeah, you see a lot of this in You know, a place where you see a lot of language generation is the business world, where you know you have a new product or a new approach. It needs a new title and needs a

new a new word for this. On sept And A great way to create it is to just crash two things together and see how they fit. Are you not infota? Okay? One more natural source of new words on amotopia. This is what we call it when a word is formed by sounding like the thing it's referring to. So plink honk hiss, the word imitates the sound of the concept. I was trying to think do we form new on a mootopias this It seems like all the ones I

can think of have been around for a while. Maybe we form them less often than some other types of words, but I'm sure we must form new ones every now and then. I was trying to think of a good modern example, and the one I thought of was I'll

ping you about that later. So originally an automotopia from the nineteenth century, this would, you know, refer to the sound of a bullet hitting metal or something ping, But because of conceptual or auditory similarities, it came to refer to things in the communications sphere, such as like a

sonar communications between submarines or between network computer user. Yeah. Um, and I would be surprised if the modern resurgence of ping in the business world or in the workplace didn't have something to do with the ping like notification sounds and email and chat apps. Uh. Yeah, I was trying to think of some more like some recent ones, and I was looking around at some examples of sort of modern lingo, and perhaps yeat is an example. I'm not

sure what does that? What does that imitate? The sound of? Well? Okay, well let me define it for anyone so as the kids will use this term these days. According to uh, to my sources on the internet, it seems to be either a strong version of yes or to quote, throw something forcefully in a specified direction, as in I yeeded a cup of noodles across the room. Yeah, but like heat,

like I can sort of, I'm not sure. I'm not positive that there's any um in anything to it, Like to throw something doesn't necessarily create the sound of yeat. But then when you start like trying to figure out how the sounds work in your head, you know, I can sort of half formulate a case for yeat being an actual sound. God, we sound so cool right now. I'll have to keep thinking about that one. Think about

it the next time you throw something across the ring. Okay, alright, on that note, We're going to take one more break, but when we come back we will dive into some examples of intentionally invented words. All right, we're back. Okay. Now we've been looking at ways that words arise in language without being intentionally invented. When they arise through the process, that's more akin to biological evolution. But what about when we want to frankenstein some words just like make them

in the lab um. So sort of going back to the business scenario, you've got a new product that you need to get out there, or you're rebranding another one and you gotta call it something. Well, I know somebody who would have been great at branding, and that's the English writer Horace Walpole, who lived from seventeen seventeen to seventeen uh And the term that he coined that everybody knows. He actually coined quite a few, but most of them

are forgotten. The one that everybody knows is serendipity. And this comes from a letter that Walpole was writing to a friend named Horace Man, different from the American education reformer. I'm pretty sure I think this Horseman was a British diplomat. But the letter was dated January seventeen fifty four. And despite the magical delight of serendipity as a concept, I have to say the occasion by which he ends up

describing it is incredibly dull. Basically, Walpole says that he accidentally discovered a historical link between two families while he was studying their coats of arms in a reference book. Earth shaking right. But he's writing about this process, and he says, quote, this discovery indeed is almost of that kind which I call serendipity, a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavor to explain to you. You will understand it better

by the derivation than the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale called the Three Princes of serendip As their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity of things which they were not in quest of. For instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right. Now do

you understand serendipity. One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity, for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you were looking for comes under this description. Was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who, happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs Hyde by the respect with which her mother treated her at table god riveting right dinner.

How he treated her. Oh man, it's it's hard to believe the term really took off at all reading this, but it's a great term, right, because it really does describe something, the idea of a happy accident, that the occurrence or development of events by a thing that was, you know, in a way that's beneficial, but that was not intended by the agent. Yeah, like when you run into an old friend at a subway on a subway ride, you think this is exactly like a one eyed donkey

eating grass on one side of the road. I think something, at least in the way I use the word. It's especially serendipitous if it's um a situation in which you know, in the course of trying to do one thing, especially if that thing is foolish or misguided, you actually accomplish something different and good. Yes, it's like the foolishness of

the original errand that makes something especially serendipitous. But according to a post that excerpted from this letter in the Paris Review, the adjective form of the word serendipitous was not recorded until nineteen forty three. So that's a pretty big spend of time. And I wonder do intentionally invented words take longer on average to find all of their

derived parts of speech. I don't know. I mean, it seems like they have to have a certain amount of sticking power to just like language is a living thing, you know. Um, so if you create a word and it doesn't take off, you know, if someone's out there not making it happen, like pushing it into the into the lexicon, Yeah, how does it ever gain a foothold? Well?

I think about the fact that when a word feels organic, you're more likely to assume that it's derived different parts of speech already exist, right, that you're not making them up when you say them, Whereas when a word is something that you're aware of, as like an intentional recent coinage, you might be more likely to think, oh, serendipitous that's not a word. This is also probably the struggling point

for ZA. Right. That's why why I think that I could be wrong that I don't think a lot of people are using ZA as an abbreviation for pizza just because it's it's It sounds fake, it doesn't seem helpful. Okay. So Walpole also provides early written evidence for some other terms, though not necessarily always of his intentional coinage. When I was reading about that I thought was great is from an article in The New Republic by David Crystal that's all about terms for drunkenness in English. A lot of

these are forgotten, and this term comes from Walpole. The term is muckibus, meaning drunkenly sentimental, which is a good thing to have a word for, right, like you know, I love you man, No, I love you man. Muckibus uh sounds a little bit like sucky bus too, so it has this kind of like demonic of quality to it as well of the of the will being overpowered. Would you believe that this word comes from a dinner party.

So it's an anecdote that Walpole shares in a letter to George Montague on April seventeen, fifty six, Walpole says, so he's at a dinner party, he's having supper. He overhears somebody named Lady Coventry saying that if she drank anymore, she would become mucky buss. And then somebody named lady Mary Coke asks what that means, and Coventry says that

it was Irish for sentimental. Crystal writes quote. The mock Latin ending is known from other facetious eighteenth century slang formations, such as stinky buss, but there is no obvious connection with muck. Lady Coventry came from Ireland. The likelihood is that Walpole misheard a genuine Irish word, perhaps, and here I'm gonna do my best with an Irish word here queen yuck, which is spelled m A O I t h n e a c h Ireland to get it together. Come on, that's okay. I think it's ween yuck uh,

and it means sentimental. Yeah, I should say. Crystal's article also mentions a bunch of other terms for drunkenness, including my new favorite uh not a loan word, not a new coinage, a classic Anglo Saxon word which is sim bell goal, meaning wanton with drink feasting. This one also sounds demonic in nature, which is I went to the Black Sabbath and I became Simon bell goal. Thinking about serendipity though, actually got me on the subject of another

invented word that I really like. That comes from the American philosopher Daniel Dinnett, and it's his concept of a deepity. I think we've talked about this on Stuff to Blow your Mind before, but I read about this idea in Dinnett's book called Intuition, Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, remember discussing that. So a deepity is a special kind of equivocation. And of course equivocation is a word or phrase that's used in two different way as to a

misleading effect. So you might say, like, um, why would you read all the arguments for and against Dennett's theory of consciousness? Isn't there enough arguing in the world? You know, uh, people people say stuff like this all the time, you know it hinges on two different meanings of the word argument. In one sense, an argument is just explaining why you think something's true. In another sense, it means like angry

or acrimonious. So so that's an equivocation. Generally, a deepity is a specific kind of equivocation that you'll probably recognize immediately from your life. It's a statement that can either be interpreted as true and utterly trivial or profound and obviously false. Okay, but it but it takes advantage of like the good haves of both of these versions. So an example would be if somebody says love is just

a word. So either you're talking about the word love, in which case this statement is true, but it is a banal truism and doesn't okay, so what, Yes, the word love is a word, or you're saying that the feeling of love is itself nothing more than a word, in which case the statement is stupid and nobody would

bother paying any attention to you. There was I want to say on burto echo wrote something about or I can't remember if you wrote it or quoted it about some uh some some treatment on the on the rose uh saying like the first person to make this statement was quite possibly a genius and the second person to make it was an idiot. Um oh was he talking about nominalism though? With William Vacham in the name of

the likely so, but yeah, it was. It was from I want to say it was from the introduction or the the afterword to the name of the rose, but it's since been whilst I've read that. Well, I mean,

I guess. Another thing that's true is like with any statement, even an obviously stupid one, with enough effort, you can find something that that might be true about it a way of interpreting it, or if the the actor reciting the line is skilled enough, it can seem a lot more profound than it is, and you can be like, oh, man, yeah, love is just a word. I just heard Benedict Cumberbatch say it, and I'm feeling it hardcore. Right, It's totally different. Brian Cox could say it and I'd be like, oh,

he's right. But if it's the actor who plays Badger on Breaking Bad, different story, entirely right. In fact, love is just a word is a great example because you can make tons of deepities with the X is just a y formulation. Lots of them are like this one example that we thankfully hear a lot less of than we used to. Like ten years ago, this was everywhere you looked. Evolution is just a theory. Remember this one. So it hinges on two different understandings of the word theory.

One interpretation of the sentence is true but trivial. Another interpretation of the sentence, where theory means something like unfounded speculation would up end all of modern biology if it were true, but his pat ly false. Yeah, it does. That statement does tend to hinge on misunderstanding of what theories are and what role they play in our understanding of the world. Other things are not quite as obvious as a deepity, but feel vaguely deepity ish one that

I was, one that I came across. His beauty is only skin deep like. In one sense, this could be saying physical beauty is only physical, which is true but not very profound. Or it could be saying beauty has nothing to do with transcendent qualities like morality or character, in which case is that true, like don't we often find things beautiful because they're morally good or thoughtful or meaningful? Yeah.

Depending on how you interpret it, it it it could mean one of two, just dramatically different ideas, and the sense in which it is obviously true doesn't really mean anything I noticed in the real world. Deepity is often shoot by you real fast. They tend to be the kind of thing that somebody doesn't just say and leave hanging, but they say and then move on from You know, they're talking very quickly, like they can sound good for half a second if you don't stop to think about them.

But I was also thinking about deepity is interesting because there's something about the way the words sounds that was clearly part of the selection process for attaching this word to this concept like uh. Originally, Dinntt says that the word was coined by a daughter of a friend of his. Her name is Miriam Wisenbaum, and originally she had been at the dinner table sort of like lightly mocking her father for some kind of kind of overly ponderous thing.

He said uh. And then Dinnett heard this word from her and then reimagined it because of the sound of the word fits so well with the concept that he wanted a word for uh. And it brings to mind the concept of idiophones, which we explored on an episode

of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Basically, the idea that uh, certain um syllables and words sounds in our in our minds are naturally widely associated with with concepts such as physical textures, like there are words that naturally sound slimy to us or have certain kind of moral connotations to us that are just like sounds totally apart from semantic meaning, right, Yeah. You often see this in the like the names of

fictitious characters. Um. Part of this is is we've been on a Harry Potter kick at the house and so like a lot of the names that J. K. Rowling uses, you know that, I feel feel like they line up with this rather well. You know, like uh um, several snape you know, that's just it drips it. It feels and sounds like the the the individual it is. It hisses like a Slytherin, Yeah, Slytherin itself exactly. Yeah. But

I mean there is something going on here. I think like, if you're not building a neologism entirely out of root words that have semantic meanings, I mean, it's a different thing to go with, like malapropism, where that's built out of root words from another language age that have some kind of meaning already. You wouldn't be able to tell what deepity means just by looking at the word right right, It doesn't doesn't have a semantic suggestion unless you've heard

it explain to you or heard it used. So to what extent is possible Idiophonic residue guide the choice of words being linked to concepts like that. I mean, I'm thinking about it in my head itty deep bitty, the itty part of it somehow sounds like the concept to me, what brings to mind itty biddy, It brings it mind smallness, So it's like a small small depth. But it like

that's kind of a stretch. It's not there's nothing you can't really get there by analyzing actual grammar, right because itty bitty is itty bitty even in Webster's I don't know, it's it's very much slang. Uh, it's bits. I'm not even sure where that comes from, itty bitty, I don't know deepitty, just in terms of in examples of have invented terminology. Uh, this is what I was thinking about recently. Psychonaut because when you when you hear it, I mean

it's composed out of the out of the Greek. So you it's easy to assume that this has been with us a very long time, but it is more like malapropism, and that it's built out of roots that do have meanings that you could identify. Yes, yeah, because I clearly it's drawing from the popular use of say astronaut, which means star sailor or cosmonaut, universe sailor. And of course you have the the argonauts of Greek myth, who were

simply sailors in the vessel argo um. But psychonaut. When I was looking into it, I was thinking, Okay, this term must have been around here in the sixties. Uh,

And it apparently wasn't. The term is widely used now, but it didn't seem to emerge until German author Ernst Hunger used it in nineteen in the nineteen seventy, and it was subsequently picked up by various occultists and ethnobotanists, and now it's become, you know, just sort of a standard and really quite useful term for describing various twenty or twenty first century individuals like say John C. Louis or Terrence Mackinna, people who were explorers in the realm

of the mind. Yeah, yeah, but also yeah, but also drawing in that sort of astronaut and motif of one of one who goes out by going in and then Joe I know you want to discuss, uh, the thagomizer. Oh right, this comes from This is one of our favorites. It's come up on stuff to blow your mind a lot. So the thagomizer is something that was coined as a joke in a Gary Larson cartoon. It refers to the

arrangement of spikes on the tail of a stegasaurus. Uh and it's uh So there's a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon where a caveman is apparently teaching a class and is pointing to a picture like a slide projector I G a slide of one of these things and says, now this end is called the thagomizer, after the late

thag Simmons, which is wonderful. Yeah. So, so this was eventually picked up by actual paleontologists who found this hilarious because prior to this so you didn't have a name for the spiked tail is just the spike tail of a Stegasaurus or some other type of stegasaur. And when you when you try to start breaking down how thagomizer would even work as a word, it's crazy because okay, we have fag. Fag is the name of the caveman,

victim of the dinosaur, your proper down there, right. And but then we come to almiser O M I z r. And this is just nonsense because yes, you do have some English words that end with almiser, but their words like randomizer, economizer, customizer, atomizer, and these all are root words that themselves end in um, like atom and then we get atomizer. So where does the arm come from in thagom eiser? The eyser part of makes more sense because I guess it's kind of like with tenderizer that

brings us to eyes. So if you allow us to further u etomologize here, uh, it is just an old suffix, like a long established suffix that that turns that allows us to make a noun or adjective into a verb, and then this can in turn be made into a noun. So I just etymologized. I am the etymologizer, which is not a real word but could be could extrapolate into it,

and you could follow the trails back to real words. Fagomizer, if we are stretching, would at best mean a thing that turns one into thag simmon, which makes no sense. And yet at the same time, the joke still works. Like me, clearly it worked. It was picked up, it becomes an unofficial name for this part of the dinosaur. I think official now is it official? Yeah, I mean I think it's used in scientific publications. Well that sounds

good enough to me. So clearly it works when we hear it, even though it doesn't when you dissect it linguistically. It's just nonsense. But but we buy into it. I guess you know, fag was perhaps atomized or tenderized by the spiked tail, and you know that is weirdly a relayed in the term thagomizer, even though it's just kind of a distorted echo of actual language. Unfortunately, I think

we're gonna have to call it here for today. We're running out of studio time, even though yeah, but yeah, we um we will be back with part two of our series Uninvented Words. Here. I'm having a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah, this is this is a this is a fun one, and I like where this journey is going because eventually we can even get into the realm of invented language. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Invention, find us wherever you find podcast wherever

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