Invented Words, Part 2

neologisms and something we might call protologisms. So a neologism is a newly coined term that's like still in the process of coming into common use. You might use the term because you're an early adopter of it, but it might be the kind of word that people still need to look up a good bit. You might need to

explain what it means if you use it in an article. Right, it could be very much be one of those words that you get the feeling that's that people in in the culture are trying to make happen, like they're trying to establish it, uh and and get it into it just the the everyday lexicon. Right, that that would be what happens if it's successful, it just becomes a regular word. You no longer need to explain it. You don't need

to look it up. Most people just know what it means. Uh. And there are a few examples of neologisms like I could think of that have just become regular words in recent years. One great example, I think is selfie. You know how this was once a cute new word, and people would remark on the fact that it was a cute new word, like the fact that it was a neologism was one of the main things you know about it.

And now it's just sort of a word, and it's it's weird, like selfie as a term has this kind of like viral presence and movement in our in our culture, but but also the act associated with it seemed to spread with it. And I wonder to what extent are you seeing the the act the practice of taking selfie. Is that pulling the term with it through our culture or is it the reverse or is it some combination of the two. I think that certainly the first part

that you're talking. I think there are definitely technological pressures that made room for this word to intercommon usage. So the word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in but the word has a kind of interesting history Before that, I was looking up, but what what was the earliest use of selfie? Because obviously the act of taking a photograph of yourself goes way back. People have been doing that for more than a hundred years, with various contraptions,

even just like timers on cameras and stuff. Um. But the first documented use of the word selfie appears to come from the year two thousand two, when an Australian man posted the following message on an Internet forum on a news website. Specifically, this was a thread from September two two by a user named Hopie h O p e Y, and the statement goes like this, UM drunk at a mates twenty one, I tripped over and landed lip first with front teeth coming a close second on

a set of steps. I had a hole about one centimeter long right through my bottom lip and sorry about the focus. It was a selfie. He attaches a photo of his busted lip for people to look at. The purpose of the thread was Hopie wondering whether licking his lips would make his stitches dissolved too early, and he's of course apologizing for the the the quality of the photographs saying I have taken it myself. It is a selfie, right, so this is before selfie sticks. This is even before

you know, any kind of high quality camera phone. This probably would have been taken I guess with just like a handheld digital camera pointed back at his face. But he probably wouldn't have the ability to see the screen while he's taking the picture, right, so he just has to guess yeah, yeah, so yeah. Been the early days of selfies when they were, they're even a far more chatic. Though it's not clear that the author of this post actually intended to invent a word, or even that he

invented a word at all. It might have been a slang word in oral circulation before ever being written out in this context, and it does follow a standard way of inventing slang words in Australian English, which is adding a hyphen i e suffix to a noun, So like a barbecue becomes a barbie, you know, put another shrimp on the barbie, or a can of beer becomes a

tinny from tin can. I haven't heard that one in use, but it makes sense and by the same lexical logic, a photograph of the self becomes a selfie, you know, put another duck lips on the selfie. But if this was a term in oral slang in Australian English before it appeared in print, I would say it probably wasn't being used a lot, because if it was used a lot,

you'd expect to find it written down at this point. Now, of course, the obvious question about this is like, why does it then get picked up, Why does selfie become a tern, how does it create How does this journey even begin into widespread usage. Yeah, so after two thousand two it pop up here and there, but it didn't come anywhere near common usage until around two thousand twelve when it's suddenly got very popular. And this probably had

to do with simultaneous techno cultural trends. You had new generations of camera phones and of social media a way to take selfies and then also a place to post them. And this I think the technology made a pre existing

word suddenly very useful. And it may also, I think have played an important psycho social role, like does having a word like selfie help defuse potential doubts or worries people have that they are engaging in narcissistic behavior does the word take an act that you might worry is

unsavory and make it cute? Like that? There? I was reading something where the editorial director of the Oxford Dictionaries in said, specifically of the word, the use of the diminutive I e. Suffix is notable as it helps to turn and essentially narcissistic enterprise into something rather more endearing. But then again, maybe that's overly harsh. You could look at it the other way, like, does having a word like selfie make it easier to disparage an activity that

most people do? You know, it's not like you have to be some raging narcissists to take a selfie? Does it just like make it easier to mock people like this? Well? Yeah, yeah, I can certainly see both sides of the coin there. And now, another thing about the about adding I e to to something is it comes from the the the parental sphere of things and uh and observing how children will frequently add that to a word to say, name is stuffed animal. So if it's a bear, you might

just make it it's Barry Buries the name of the bear. Um, you know, it's it's a cute. See addition to any word uh. And then that lines up with this idea that it makes something that could be viewed as being you know, egotistical or not narcissistic, as being something that

is ultimately cute and harmless. Well, if you say, ah ha, I took a selfie, it almost is self deprecating in a way that defuses the potential for someone to criticize you as narcissistic for doing it right, because it is it has this feeling of being silly as well as you know, silly, harmless, but also maybe a little bit narcissistic. But but but but it is acknowledging the inherent narcissism of the act, you know, and and dismissing it with

this air of silliness to it. Like if we instead of having picking up the words selfie, if we'd gone with ego bonk, you know, like that would probably be that's a little bit silly too. But I can see where people would be a little less inclined to use that terminology if they were like, well, i'm early for my meeting. Here's a quick ego bonk. Uh. You know, quick selfie works a lot better, and it's a little a little catchier. Yeah, or if we'd called it like

self porn or something. Not going to take that back, Sorry, you know I just said, and then try to take it back, But you convince me we should go down this road. I was saying, another alternative, what would you call it? You call it something like mirror porn or something like. That's you know, self porn, because this is now a common suffix. Actually, absolutely, you hear people talking

about what food porn or food porn? I think was the big one that caught hold the idea that of of saying that generally photography of food and a picture of some sort of a very delicious looking dish or or a beverage or something, uh is therefore therefore should be compared to pornography, which is a weird pairing because pornography is incredibly divisive in in culture. There it is it is, you know, no matter what your personal take on it. There's a lot of problematic area to consider

when thinking about pornography. Why do we drag it then in to our consideration of say a very inviting looking lasagna, Well, yeah, it could be just what we're talking about with this possibility for selfie that it's like self deprecating and ironic in a way that diffuses other people's ability to criticize you for engaging in it, because it's like you're already sort of criticizing yourself, right, and I guess you're also leaning into the idea that into the the excess of

pornography and and therefore diffusing this like food styling, uh you know, high art photography, food photography interpretations that might otherwise be uh applied to it. So like if you were to say, hey, I'm trying to out some food photography, then people would have it would be able to say, well, actually, i've seen professional food photography, and you know that the lighting looks weird here. Um, you know, the the phizz

isn't right. It's said right. You know, we've all I think picked up on some of the various tips, tricks and and uh and illusions that are involved in that. But if you just say, oh, it's just food porn, that kind of implies that that it's it's less about the art and more about invoking a visceral bonds to the stimuli. Yeah, I think I think you're right there.

So obviously words like this are are great examples of powerful lexical success stories like a selfie, of course is though probably a much greater number of newly coined words just fall by the wayside, right, you know, Instead, they become little blips in literary history that you can find in articles from a certain time period, but they just

don't catch on. They don't become common, right Like I'm imagining, um, drunk injured Australian dudes say a lot of interesting things, but they don't all become parts of the global lexicon, right. And I think with these examples, the things that fall by the wayside, it might be useful to think of them as sort of failed protologisms or protologism. Oh man, I think I'm going back and forth on whether that that g is hard or soft. We'll we'll just plow

right through um. But the idea of a protologism is a term introduced by the Russian American UH literary theorist Mikhail in Epstein, who I believe is still a professor at Emory University here in Atlanta. Quick question, is the word protologism a protologism or a neologism? I would say at this point it is a neologism. It was originally a protology well, I guess I have to define them. So a protologism in Mikhail Epstein's definition is that it's a word that is freshly coined and hasn't yet been

accepted by many speakers at all. And the evidence of this would be that it has not yet been published by anyone other than the person or group that coined it. And I imagine they're using the term published here in the broader sense, so not merely the printed word, but any kind of media publication in the same way, in the same way you might treat publishing in publication and say both libel and slander law. Right, So if you are trying to make fetch happen but nobody else is

saying fetch, then it's still a protologism for you. Maybe if you get a few other people saying fetch, you're starting to make fetch happen, then it's becoming a neologism. And if it keeps going and then everybody starts using it, then it's common use. Not to say it's immortal, not to say it cannot then die, fall out of fashion,

and die again, but it has at least gained a foothold. Yeah, So by these standards, I would say protologism was once a protologism, but it is no longer a protologism, given that you can find articles out there that are not written by Michael Epstein himself that are using this term and talking about it, so it has probably legitimately graduated

to being a fledgling neologism. It's, you know, still sort of a young word, a word that not everybody knows, but it has use outside the the original you know, like the room where it was created or the person

who tried to coin it. So under this model, the progression goes like that you've a person or a group coins a new term or usage this is a protologism, and then an expanded subset of the population sort of tries out the new term for a period of time, but it still often needs to be defined or look to up. At this point you would say it's probably a neologism. And then eventually the term just becomes a word of common use. It doesn't need to be looked up or defined in the context in which it is

normally used. I mean, people still have to look up all kinds of words, but like there there at least will be contexts in which the word is regularly used, and and the people within those contexts all know what it means. I'd say a good indicator here is when people mostly stop googling the word for a definition. Imagine there's a new word. Let's say it is schmirf plex, like in the first time you hear it as someone says, Hey, come to my house at eight and bring your smurf

smirt plex. Well, I don't know what a smirt plex is, and that sentence gives me no context. I have no idea what I'm supposed to bring. All I know is that smirt plex can be brought. But smirt plex could be it could be an attitude, it could be it could it could be a physical thing. I don't know. Or someone might say pizza cutter, Yeah, there's no way to tell. Someone might say, Gosh, I really like Dylan, I just wish he wasn't so smirt plexy. Again, no idea.

That's depending on how it said. You might be able to lean into positive or negative interpretations, but beyond that hard to say. Now, if someone says I can't wait to smirt plex that slice of pizza, or do do you smirt plex that slice of pizza? In one goal.

Both of these examples give you far more context for not only how it is being used, but then how it can be reused appropriately yea, or at least semi appropriately, And then with some course correction, you can wind up in a place where you were finally using this new term correctly and passing it viraly onto those around you. Well, this example brings up a great question, which is why

would you bother inventing a new word for something? The side of course, to illustrate a point in a podcast, right, yes, now it's clear why you do it there, But what like what if you were actually trying to make smirt plex happen? Is there a reason you would be doing this? Maybe we should take a break and then when we come back we can talk about that. Alright, we're back, all right. We were asking the question of why protologisms are coined. When somebody comes up with a new word

for something on purpose, Why does that happen? One pretty important reason for coining into a new term, obviously, I think it comes about often in science, and that's discovering a new process or proposing a new theory. You're essentially saying we have new new content in the world. Now, and we need a word to describe it. It's not something that you're already familiar with that we just wanted

a different word for right. So I found a short article from two thousand eleven by Andrew Moore, who's the editor in chief of a journal called bio Essays, and in this article he talks about the importance of neologisms and the sciences, and he writes the following. Neologisms or

protologisms quote may be considered seductive in two senses. Firstly, because their creators are seduced by the ability need to express a potentially new scientific concept in language, a creative act that might stake their claim as the first to discover something. Secondly, because they often find favor in the rest of the scientific community for their conciseness. So here more argues that in the science is protologisms play multiple roles.

The first, of course, is the straightforward utility, being that they are concise. So like once Charles Barnes invented the word photosynthesis, it was much more convenient to just say photosynthesis than to say the process by which autotrophic organisms like plants use energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars, rolls off the tongue much better, right You. You don't want to have to explain that process every time you talk about it. You can just

use the one new word now. And new terms appear in the sciences all the time because they're indisputably useful. They save time, they save space, and now now you all have the same word you can refer to when you're talking about something, so you know you're talking about

the same thing. In addition to that, though that this thing more is drawing attention to, is that they may play a psychological and social role within their use in the sciences because the neologism number one, it helps its coiner secure credit for having identified or proposed the thing or the hypothesis in question. And I think this is

really truly the case. I think how often on this very show, historical priority for discoveries and inventions is in fact a disputed, but we generally end up trying to give recognition to the first person to use the same

word that everybody still uses for the thing. Right. Yeah, Well, when when someone is calling the particular invention by a different term, it's sort of implied that they didn't have it figured out all the way, right even maybe even if that person was more important in the in the technological discoveries that led to the to the invention, right right, Yeah, because ultimately, yeah, that the spread of the name is

tied with the spread of the idea. I feel like we have repeatedly run into this in invention history, where you know, somebody else's work was more pivotal, but ultimately credit goes to the person who came up with the word. But then, the other point is that the new word also makes other scientists more likely to remember and discuss your hypothesis or discovery, because it's easier to talk about when it has a name, especially if it has a catchy name. Uh So more rights. He gives an example quote.

It is said that kur at All, in their landmark nineteen seventy two paper, coined the term apoptosis, and of course that means um, you know, programmed cell death within the body uh from the Greek apo meaning from and potosis meaning falling uh to sound similar to necrosis, it's biological counterpart. Though at the time more than a few scientists doubted that the new word was anything more than

an impostor disguising a specific case of necrosis. It's certainly helped to catapult the concept into new realms of attention and hence testability. So this is interesting. It's like if you're a scientist, you've got a new phenomenon you you think you've discovered, or a hypothesis you want more people to investigate. If you come up with a good word for it, other scientists are more likely to pay attention and start putting your idea to the test. In a

weird way. To come back to the invention parallels, it's very much like branding and marketing. Yeah, I think evolution is another great example of this. You know, like the term uh so nicely sums up what is otherwise a fairly complicated process that might not roll off the tongue

as easily. Oh and this was huge at the time, with you know, Darwin agonizing over what was the best terminology to use to explain in a simple way his complex ideas, Like there was the competition within the theory for you know, was it better to call it natural selection or survival of the fittest. We have an episode of stuff to blow your mind where we talk about just like the fight back and forth between those two terms which sort of described the same thing, but they

have different marketing appeals. Now, the other side of the coin and all of this is is that why while the use of words like this can certainly make it easier to communicate about topics within the sciences, there's there is evidence to indicate that it can in some cases make it harder for those outside the field to understand

what's being discussed. Uh. And then this can often result in a in a lack of interest in science or politics is another example that's brought up or a feeling that one is not good at science or politics, you know and so so not not an idea that you don't understand it and maybe you can't understand it. Um. This according to a fairly recent study from Hilary Shulman, Assistant Professor of Communication at the Ohio State University. UM,

you just came out in a patst couple of months. Basically, the idea is that the the specialized terms they're looking at, we're proving to be a stumbling block to interest. And this of course just drives home the importance of science communication and journalism in the fields of science and politics, because obviously you need those specialized terms within science, within the sciences, within like you know, academic discussion of politics, etcetera.

But then if you were going to convey those ideas to the to the world outside of that in group, you have to have more generalized terminology. You have to find to have a way of reaching him, at least until those terms become so widely used that you don't have to worry about it, right, I mean, yeah, I mean there are different considerations in play in these different types of communication. I mean in scientific publications. Yeah, you would waste a lot of space if you couldn't use

technical jargon. It just like allows you to say a lot more in a lot less words, right, And a lot of this also comes down to intended audience as well, Like, uh, you know, the average person on the street is not the intended reader for an academic neuroscience paper. Likewise, I am not the the intended listener for a you know, a very specific nineties dance hall uh reggae tune. You know. Um,

I have to come to it as an outsider. And now it's possible that you know, years or decades down the road, some of those terminal terms become part of the general lexicon in either example. But it's not necessarily going to be the case. Now there are examples, clearly, I think where what you're talking about, though, where technical language is just purely counterproductive, or at least counterproductive given what somebody might state their their aims are, maybe not

to what their actual aims are. Joe, are you saying that it's time to synergize backwards overflow? I think it's time to talk a little bit about corporate speak. Yeah. Uh so, of course one of my favorite sources of everyday comedy and shame is corporate speak, this vast, shallow cool of business neologisms that I sometimes imagine us just sort of spending our days ladling over one another, like so much stagnant pond water. We have to swim through

it from time to time. Yeah, And there was recently a really excellent article I thought on corporate speak in New York Magazine. It was from February of this year, so by Molly Young called garbage language. Why do corporations speak the way they do? Uh? In my opinion, this was a very funny and insightful article on on the phenomena of business buzzwords, which she calls garbage language, taking the term from a novelist, and by that you might

guess where she stands on the subject. And of course this kind of language is easy to hate, but that doesn't make her wrong. She begins with an example of a corporate word that she encountered at a startup where she recently worked. Quote. The term was parallel path. And I first heard it in this sentence, we're waiting on specs from the San Francisco installation. Can you pari well path two versions? Translated, this means we're waiting on specs

from the San Francisco installation? Can you make two versions? So she summarizes, in other words, to parallel path is to do two things at once. That's all. But it gives it this kind of It almost has like a Buddhist air to it. Right, there's a middle path, parallel paths. It sounds far more peaceful than can you do twice as much work as we originally talked about. I'm sure you know you've probably heard me complain about this on

one of our shows before. This kind of thing is so annoying to me, and I want to be clear, I understand the creation of new technical terms in business when they function the way that words normally do, right by putting a concise name to something that would otherwise require more explanation. And I think there are plenty of perfectly legitimate business terms that are actually useful, and they could be compared to specific technical jargon, and like medicine

or the science is one example. Here might be the original use of disruption or disruptive. Like originally this referred to a specific thing. It wasn't a new word, but it was a word that gained a new usage in a business context. And uh, this was coined by a guy named Clayton Christensen in the nineties, and it referred to like an innovation that creates a new market and a new type of value, displacing old markets and old values.

So an example might be the mass production of automobiles with the Model T, which isn't just a new competitor and entering a market, but it completely kind of disrupts the transportation market. It, you know, upsets the old like

traditional horse and buggy market. Uh. But even with this word, which originally I think has a specific meaning and is useful, I think there's a kind of semantic creep, right, whereover time its meaning becomes less specific and people start using the word disruption or disruptive to just refer to any business innovation or maneuver that they want to be seen as new and dynamic. It's like it's like using the

word like powerful or strong. You see people describing business things as disruptive that are in no way really changing markets, are creating new markets. They're just like they're just saying, like, you know, we're gonna be big, We're gonna spend a lot of money on this and enter the market. So some words really have a meaning, But at the same time, a lot of corporate speak just feels like replacing one number of normal, understandable words with an equal number or

more of confusing, buzzy technical words. There's no efficiency advantage in the communication. The communication becomes understandable by a smaller number of people. Why does this happen well? With regard to the idea of a parallel path, Young continues quote, I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrases assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office.

It's denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask in effectively instead of single tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, and it's fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist. The perfect corporate neologism now hold on. One can multitask and effectively at home as well as in the office. That's quite true. I think we can all attest to that. But but no,

I get their point here. As she discusses a bunch more examples, I think I'd say the article is very worth reading. And of course she's fairly merciless and hypothesizing the reasons these terms are often used. For example, she says that you know, some corporate speak simply reflects a desire to reimagine exactly what type of work it is you're doing and what that work means. She says, quote, our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning.

Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyper efficiency, while the language of self empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work, a sense that what we're doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of free snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired

instantly for complaining on Slack about it. And she ends this uh string of thoughts by saying, empowerment language is a self marketing asset as much as anything else, a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves. I think there's a lot of truth to that. Yeah, yeah, And a lot of times it does seem very you know, intentionally euphemistic, you know, to try to having to explain describe something in terms that are less damaging or more positive.

Like one example that comes to mind is is something that's used a lot in business speaking, that's pivoting, you know, pivoting to video, for example, which sounds a lot better than you know, drastically or recklessly changing course or being thrown in the throne off course by you know, the slightest change and the winds of of of public demand and business. That sort of thing, Uh, pivot sounds like very geometric, you know, it sounds very precise and premeditated.

It's what your office chair does when you turn to look at your other monitor, an obvious one about obvious. One of these euphemisms is just trying to cover up hard truths. Is like when I don't know all of the buzzy corporate words for basically firing people. Oh yeah, like, are you gonna fire people? Are you going to terminate people? Are you going to engage in a strategic head count reduction?

Or a new one? This was one that only came out recently to my knowledge, employment dislocation, which when I first read it, I had no idea what it meant. I was like, oh, I guess they moved their jobs to another city, like there's there's a geographic change, and maybe it wasn't that bad. And I think, now what

we're talking about is just people being terminated. I mean, but but then again, you know, look at it from a business's standpoint and like, no, what business is going to you know, send out a corporate email and begin by saying, who, we just really had a blood bath. Everybody.

If you're reading this, you're all right, but you know, no, no, nobody's gonna engage in that kind of uh, you know, intercommunication about what has happened or out of communication you're you're you're gonna want to put a positive spin on it and leave the negative interpretations to other folks to do.

What do you know? One of the worst things about this type of language is as much as I hate it, I sometimes find myself unconsciously using it in work emails and stuff I don't mean to, but it infects you. Here's the Well, here's one that we've I've seen used to hear at work from time to time. What happens when a new podcast or even an older podcast UH is not living up to expectations? Well, do you just cancel it? Do you terminate it? Or do you son

set it? That's one of those great examples. Yeah. Well, one of the things that Young talks about a lot in the article is the recent explosion of new ag language in UH in business, you know, corporate speak, Like there are these phases where corporate speak in the eighties was infected with all these Wall Street style terms, and in the nineties there was a lot of there was a lot of like war and battle type language in corporate speak. And for some reason, now we're in an

age of new age kind of mystical corporate speak. Are they saying things like, alright, it's time to really open up the chakras on this new ad campaign. I think there are some things like that. I think a lot of it probably comes from the tech world actually, where they're you know, there are a ton of people in the tech world who are also plugged into like Eastern religion and stuff, so so I guess you could say a lot of it is is tied to in these

cases to putting a new spin on something that is familiar. Uh, Like taking something that may seem even exotic and using that is a way to recast something that is for far more ordinary. Yeah, I think there there are several reasons we can come away with here why we often

see the introduction of neologisms in the corporate world. One is to sort of reimagine or put a new psychological spin on what it is you're doing that you know, makes it feel maybe more spiritual, or makes it feel more combative or something whatever it is that gets you amped up. Another is to be euphemistic, to like to take hard truths and make them sound like something different

than they are. And then I would say there is another one, which is just a desire to sound professional, like there's this idea that okay, where are people definitely doing real work. One place you know that they're doing that is like in the sciences and in engineering and stuff, and they have lots of technical jargon, you know. But in the sciences and engineering you probably need a lot of technical jargon that is not actually there's nothing equivalent

to it that's necessary in a normal office. But you have this desire to feel like you are accomplishing things at the same level as the sciences are in engineering. And then of course to come back to politics, and politics is very much an example of of of of a situation where you're needing to continually spin things, uh, either in one direction or the other and uh, and in doing so you come up with different different terminologies to different descriptions of of what of things that are

essentially the same. Yes, I think that fits more in with the the one about you know, wanting to reimagine your job or sell your job back to yourself with you know, new uh corporate neologisms because they help you

feel a certain way. You know, in politics, obviously you're trying to make other people feel a certain way about a concept by using pushy terminology about it all right, we're gonna take one more break, but when we come back, you know, we're gonna get into a little bit of science fiction e territory here as we look at a couple of examples of of new words that came up on us and and some of their their their fictional origins, but also some of the fictional engines that help them

reach their place in our lexicon. Alright, we're back, So we're going to talk about a couple more interesting examples of invented words and what they tell us about the you know, the the process by which words are coined. The next one I think is interesting because it's common usage is so uh intention with the spirit of its coinage. And that word is robot, right and boy, And this

is one that is um. Robot is so broadly used these days to things that are perhaps not technically robots get called robots um, and the things that sometimes things that are for all intents and purposes robots don't get called robot. It's uh, it's it's a weird one. So will be a wonderful journey. So you could be forgiven for assuming that the word robot was coined by an inventor, right, somebody who maybe somebody who made automata or somebody who

created an early autonomous machine. But no, not at all. This invented word, like so many others we have discussed, actually comes from a work of fiction. That work was a play called are You Are, which stood for Rossom's Universal Robots. And this was a play written by the check writer and intellectual Karl Choppeck. It premiered in nineteen one, and it's basic plot was that an inventor named Rossum creates a series of artificial humans to serve as slaves

for regular humans. But these slaves ultimately revolt against their human creators and they basically kill all the humans and they take over, and then they find out, oh no, we don't know how to make more of ourselves. But these slaves in the play are known as robots. And this word is not invented out of whole cloth. It's adapted from a check word. I think that comes from an old Slavonic term. Uh. The word is robot to r O b O t a, which means forced labor

or servitude. It is the kind of labor that would have been done by surfs under feudalism. Now, of course, this idea of a robot is somewhat different from what it usually means today. Today, a robot is generally some kind of machine that operates with some degree of independence and moves with some degree of freedom, mimicking human or animal movement. You can tell from what I just said, of course, that the concept is actually a little bit hazy,

even though it is so widely used. But the robots in Shopics Play, while they are manufactured products, are not depicted as being mechanical machines made out of metal. They're closer, I think, to the replicants of Blade Runner. They are sort of like basically humans in every respect, except they are manufactured instead born, And the comparison to Blade Runner is very close when you look at some of the

texts in the play. For example, there's this part where there's a triumphal speech given by a robot named Radius after he and the other robot rebels sees power from the humans. Roddy As says, quote, the power of man has fallen. By gaining possession of the factory, we have become masters of everything. The period of mankind has passed away. A new world has arisen. Mankind is no more mankind gave us two little life. We wanted more life. Oh man, that's Roy Batty, right, yeah, you can just you can

envision him giving that speech. And so it makes me think that Are you Are must have directly inspired Blade Runner. Yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly really Scott's adaptation of the original Philip K. Dick, Uh do Android's stream of Electric Sheep. But I don't think that line is in the Philip K. Dick. I don't. It's when a long time, so they're reddit, but I don't. I don't remember that as being parted. Like I remember

picking up that is. I think that was the first phil K Dick book I read, and my experience was probably like a lot of people would pick it up expecting Blade Runner at the film and it's you get something different. Is there are a lot of differences between the novel and the book is great, but oh it's wonderful. It's very different. It's very different. The book is wonderful for the kind of state of unreality that it conjures because of like the moments where the main character starts

to wonder if he is real or not. It's very Philip K. Dick I was. I would remember being so excited to read Blade Runner that I even read another another novel that was called Blade Runner. There was like a futuristic sci fi world about. It had to do with like a medical um, a medical black market, like generally somebody who's running like surgical blades. Did this come out after the movie? This was like, I'm not sure

when it came out. I just remember finding a what felt like an old book in my school library and I was like, all right, it's close enough, I'll read the whole thing. So I remember being entertaining, but it also not Late Runner. Well, anyway, I was reading a good article about this in the m I. T Press by a Penn State professor named John im Jordan's uh. And Jordan lays out some interesting context for are you

are uh? He writes of Choppe quote. Like many of his peers, he was appalled by the carnage wrought by the mechanical and chemical weapons that marked World War One as a departure from previous combat. He was also deeply skeptical of the utopian notions of science and technology. And you should remember that this was a time of great

technological utopianism. You know, remember our episodes on the invention of the supposed death ray in this period, which despite the name, was actually pitched as something beautiful and humane. It was a technology that would end all possibility of war, It would bring about an era of peace and harmony. And the death ray was by far, you know, not

the only example. This was the time of you know, Tesla and Marconi in so many others fielding the idea that coming technologies would eliminate war and disease and want. But of course there were many others like Chopek who reacted to the technological horrors of World War One with skepticism about the promises of of new science and technology.

Uh and so, yeah, he's criticizing this idea of of science that is that is not concerned with big questions, or with ethics, or or even the the ultimate purpose of its own endeavor, That is just concerned with like what sort of leverage it can have over the physical world,

what can you produce? But Jordan's characterizes chop x opinion on mechanization by saying, quote, when mechanization overtakes basic human traits, people lose the ability to reproduce, as robots increase in capability, vitality, and self awareness, humans become more like their machines. Humans and robots, in chop x critique are essentially one and the same. The measure of worth industrial productivity is one by the robots that can do the work of two

and half men. Such a contest implicitly critiques the efficiency movement that emerged just before World War One, which ignored many essential human traits. Of course, this makes me think about Dune, right, the implications of the past but lerry a jihad, that's right, hey, when which humans rise up

against the rule of machines. But it's implied, it's certainly in the original books that it's not just a it's not simply a matter of rising up against machine overlords in the physical totalitarian sense, but in a philosophical sense, the idea that the machine way of life, the machine way of thinking, has corrupted what it is to be human exactly. Yes, it's not just that they're like, you know, enemies that are trying to rule us. They've changed our

nature and we don't want that. Yeah. But anyway, given the views of the play, there's just some intense irony that this is actually the terminology that was adopted by people who would end up wanting to make autonomous machines for a living, like you know. And of course I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to go into robotics. I think robots canna have a lot of wonderful uses. Yes, certainly.

But the term you're using is saying like I want to go into robotics, is like literally like I want to go into creating slaves that will destroy our spirit and render us useless. Yeah, that's fascinating. One last thing about the word robot. It's pronunciation also appears to have changed over time. At various times it might have been pronounced more like a robot robot? Is it ever bot? Was it ever pronounced robot like Zoidberg does its futurama?

I think maybe at some point it was there. There have been multiple different ways of saying now speaking of technological fear and apprehension. Um, the next word we're going to consider here is is a perfect extension of this and ties into some of these same themes, and that is of course clone. So clone was apparently first recorded, uh to have been used somewhere between nineteen and nineteen o five, and it's from the Greek word clone, a

slip a twig with clear botanical roots. Here. Plant physiologist Herbert J. Webber coined the term in reference to the technique for propagating new plants UH through the use of cuttings, bulbs, and buds. And I was reading about this, UH in an interview that Science Friday in their Science Diction series UH conducted with Harold Marco, professor of History of Medicine

at the University of Michigan, and Ann Arbor UH. And one thing that Marco pointed out is that Webber was kind of trying to decide what term to use, Like you didn't just fire from the hip here and think, all right, what is the what? What? What words should I use? Maybe with some of those considerations we talked about earlier exactly. Yeah. So one of the other, like major contender that he came up with is actually pretty great. Uh. It is the word strength, a combination of strain and wraith. Wow.

But he, you know, decided it was too clumsy. But that being said, I want there's got to be a sci fi treatment out there, UM, somewhere where someone has decided to abandon the word clone and just talk about streiths. UH.

Like that that just changes the whole situation. Imagine, if you will, if throughout the Star Wars universe, instead of saying clone, they said straight yeah, like that would have had it would have made it feel it would have been rooted in the actual origin of our usage of clone, but it would have given it this slightly different feel and indeed strength with its Wraith connotation. It feels a little weird or like it's more in line with well,

it's good to come back to Herbert. The use of the golas in Dune, you know where you know, it doesn't it doesn't call them clones, It call you know, calls them goulas, creates this new word that drags in other um, other you know, feelings, other words, other connotations. So um and anyway, Marco, you know, as this concept steadily took off, you saw it u a lot in the agricultural world world because that's of course where it

was originally utilized. But then it bleeds over into science fiction. However, there are cases where you could have seen someone use clone a lot more of where they did. In for instance, Huxley in Brave New World doesn't refer to it as cloning,

refers to instead as the Bakonovsky process. But uh, but Market points to two specific uses of clone in the nineteen seventies that really helped to push it into the popular lexicon, the first of which is Alvin and Heidi Toffler's best seller Future Shock from the year nineteen seventy. I know you like this and the Weird Orson Welles documentary. Yeah, the weird the weird Horson Weil documentary, which I recommend looking up on YouTube, is great and a little bit cheesy.

The work of the Tofflers throughout their career, they wrote various texts of futurism, texts where they're talking about, you know, trends and how we how we um anticipate and receive new technologies, and generally the idea of future shock is the idea that the world is changing so rapidly, there's all these new technologies coming online that it overwhelms us and we feel the sense of future shock. Uh And and even today it's a you know, it's it's a work that is to a certain extent dated by their

later works. You know that they spent their their lives, they spent their careers covering this, uh, this area of consideration but it's still a very readable text, and I recommend it that this is a This is a line from Future This is a paragraph from Future Shock, where the Tofflers discuss this quote. One of the more fascinating possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself through a process known as cloning.

It will be possible to grow from the nucleus of an adult sell a new organism that has the same genetic characteristics of the person contributing the cell nucleus. The resultant human copy would start life with a genetic endowment identical to that of the donor, although cultural differences might

thereafter alter personality or physical development of the clone. And uh Interestingly enough, in that Science Friday interview, Howard Marcle pointed to another work from the seventies, this time of fictional work venties six novel by Ira Levin, The Boys from Brazil. Oh, the one about don't they want to clone Another Hitler? Yeah, it's a It concerns a a fictional plot where you have uh not Nazi ex pats living in South America who are hatching a scheme to

clone at off Hitler. Uh, you know, using cloning technology to create all of these uh the these these male children, and then trying to figure out how to raise them so that you can nurture their genetic legacy into you know, I guess the ideal form of the fere um, which

I know. There are a lot of problems with this plot, a lot of holes in this plot, but it was a very popular work and they made a pretty uh I remember being a pretty entertaining film version of this as well, and which Greg Repact plays uh uh Dr Joseph Mangela, but also Laurence Olivier is the good guy, right hunter um yeah, And so I I have very vague memories of this film. I think I saw it on American movie Classics back in the day, but I

remember it. I remember it being disturbing and effective in places. I never read the book myself, but I was leafing. I picked up grabbed a copy of it and leaf through it before we were we recorded this with this episode, and I did run across the passage where one character is telling another about the origin of the word clone and referring to the uh you know, the Greek and the uh and the the the botanical origins of the term.

Uh So, anyway, I guess the idea here is that, you know, you have two popular works that are using the word clone, and they helped to sort of boost the signal throughout uh, you know, the fictional world and just the the the popular conceptions of the science itself. One of the funny things though, in this selection you pulled out is that one character says that the old word for cloning was mono nuclear reproduction, and then complains, why would you coin a new word like clone when

the old ones convey more? The other character says, cloning is shorter. Oh, yes, how true coloss Uh yeah, and uh. I was going to actually read this this uh this bit from the Boys from Brazil, but I thought it might be a little confusing because the the character that is explaining it mentions a different biologists and mentions in English biologists by the name of Haldane, which I thought might confuse people who were listening to the origin story

that we've presented thus far. Okay, well, I hope I didn't confuse anybody. But I like how they reproduced the same conversation. It's interesting and it is again worth I think, stressing the importance of science fiction especially with scientific terminology, because there are plenty of other examples where a bit uh like an idea is presented first in science fiction

and then gets picked up as a possibility within the sciences. Yeah, you might think that somebody created a robot and then came up with the name robot, but no, yeah goodness. And this is without even getting into the situation where you have fictional worlds that in which the creator comes up with their own lexicon for like a an alternate

reality or futuristic reality like one of them. Think the more jarring examples of this would be a clockwork orange or inn In Banks wrote a book called Fearsome Engine that is totally a totally um worthwhile read. But it has like I think, three different perspectives in it, and one of them is a is is is written in this futuristic slang, and it's really really takes a little bit of getting used to before you're rolling with it and understanding what the character is saying. Um now, I

don't know. I mean, it's arguable to what extent those kind of exercises ever actually produced new words, but there's certainly the potentiality is there, um, you know, any time any time a new word is presented, you're you're putting out the possibility that it could, uh, it could become a part of language itself. Yeah, I guess, so, I guess you can't know what uh, you can't know when you're making a word happen? Right? Can you introduce something and it's like, I don't know, it's it's in their

hands now? Yeah? All right, Well, you know, hopefully this we received a lot of great feedback from our previous episode on invented words, so hopefully we'll hear a lot of great feedback on this episode as well. We would obviously love to hear everyone's thoughts on on new words that they've picked up, new words that you've rejected, or are there words from science fiction specifically that you find yourself using within a particular in group or a fandom.

Are there are there some that you wish would be picked up by the by the wider world at large? What are the worst business neologisms you've to deal with on a regular basis? Please share those with us for sure? Or the best you know? Again, I don't want to deny sometimes they might be useful. Sometimes they're very useful, all right, you say with utter despair. No all right. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Invention, you will find this show anywhere you

get your podcasts, wherever that happens to be. Just make sure you rate, review and subscribe. If you go to invention pod dot com, that will also shoot you over to the I heart listing for this show. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.

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