"Everybody wants to get inna de act" was a signature line of a mock-furious Jimmy Durante. Now, armed with a couple of simple techniques, anybody can get into the act of coining neologisms.
The easiest trick is the blendword. That snips off the first syllables of two words in a familiar phrase. It achieved a major breakthrough back before World War II with comsymp, blending "Communist sympathizer." In the early 1970s, Vice President Spiro Agnew, who delighted in driving his ideological opponents up the wall, took the phrase "radical liberal," shortened it to radic-lib, which evoked memories of comsymp and achieved his oratorical purpose.
The double front-end clip is still a favored form of creating new words. On TV, rom-com -- romantic comedy -- heats up as sit-com cools. Op-ed is from "opposite editorial," now the newspaper space for myriad opinion articles and columns. (I like to ruffle my Times editorial colleagues by calling the page on which they thunder their opinions the op-op-ed page.)
In the same way, "literary criticism" goes by the name lit-crit and "science fiction" has shown great staying power as sci-fi. Hi-fi faded fast, what with stereo, surround sound and other higher fidelity audio. Cyborgs are robotic creatures that stalk the game waves, taking their name from "cybernetic organisms."
The experienced neologist also blends the front end of one word and the back end of another: "fan magazine" is compressed into fanzine. In 1968, Governor Claude Kirk of Florida snipped the "edu-" from the front of "education" and married it to the last syllable of "bureaucrat" to form educrat, which still annoys school administrators. Spansule, a trademark, takes the last syllable of "capsule" to allow those tiny little pills inside to fire off over a given "span" of time. Polite netizens of the Web have come up with netiquette; a gasoline-alcohol mix is called gasohol and on the fringes of the yuk-yuk information world, we have infotainment.
Christine Lindberg, editor of the US Dictionary Program with Oxford University Press, draws our attention to a different category of quick and easy coinage. It takes an accepted word and puns its first syllable to give it new meaning. Young people who are loath to read books or newspapers but take everything that interests them from a television screen, a computer screen or a cell phone screen are called screenagers. Watch that word. It scares the cyborgs.
RETRONYM WATCH
Retronyms are phrases coined to indicate a great change in our society. For example, until the early 1960s, major-league baseball was played mainly in the daytime; the alternative schedule was called night baseball. Today, with 67 percent of games played at night, we have changed the modified phrase to day baseball. In the same way, guitars needed no modification until the invention of the electric guitar, which booms the strumming out across the land; that required the identification of the ancient variety as the acoustic guitar.
Come now Laura Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who like to wear pantsuits. What has that done to the traditional woman's suit, which was made up of a jacket and matching skirt? Frank Mankiewicz, captain of the Retronym Watchers, reports the new nomenclature, which reflects a big change in American life and culture: it's now being advertised as the skirt suit. Coco Chanel would be pleased.
RATTING OUT
"The Hot Kid" in America's literary dialogue dodge is Elmore Leonard. The author of the new crime novel by that name is embraced by critics and book buyers alike as the natural successor to Dashiell Hammett, Jonathan Latimer and Raymond Chandler. The Times' David Carr writes that Leonard uses "the dyad of character and dialogue to compose mini-epics on human folly, stripped of artifice and adjectives." (The medium-boiled novelist would never use a word like dyad, which drives readers to dictionaries; it means "pair" or "duality," said to come from the Greek mathematician Pythagoras' work on monads, dyads and triads.)
Leonard likes to wave readers away from those kinds of words, deriding them as part of an author's hooptedoodle, "the part that readers tend to skip." He notes that he took that word from a prologue by John Steinbeck; the author of Sweet Thursday concocted it to warn readers that chapters so labeled could be skipped with no effect on the plot. Steinbeck, who told me in a 1950 interview that one of his favorite novels was The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, might have caught Crane's first use of whoop-a-dadee in that 1895 work.
Leonard is so confident of his ear for the way his characters speak that he has them correcting one another. The slang phrase to rat on means "to put the finger on, to drop a dime on" or, in standard English, "to inform to the police about." In Be Cool, his 1999 best seller and now a minor motion picture, Leonard's tough heroine, Elaine, says, "See if he'll rat on the guy he works for." Chili, the sleazy hero, corrects her and brings the usage up to date: "You say `rat out' now."
Elaine promptly takes syntactic vengeance. When Chili says that he told a threatening hood, "If you attempt to do her bodily harm, you'll regret it as long as you live, if that," she says, "The `if that' doesn't make sense." He says that he knows that, but that "it sounded familiar," and she says that the line was in an earlier movie about the same characters. That inside stuff is catnip to Elmore Leonard fans as well as to slang lexicographers and usage buffs.
I use say here repeatedly, rather than "snorts, suggests, expostulates," etc., because today's dialogue king says, "Never use a verb other than said to carry dialogue."
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