{"id":386,"date":"2018-07-04T10:04:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-04T10:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/?p=386"},"modified":"2018-07-04T10:45:32","modified_gmt":"2018-07-04T10:45:32","slug":"brave-new-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/07\/04\/brave-new-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Brave new words"},"content":{"rendered":"

Words are all around us. And there are a lot of them out there! The Oxford English Dictionary<\/em><\/a> contains full entries for over 170,000 words in current use and over 47,000 obsolete words. Yet, surprisingly, the Economist<\/em> newspaper reports<\/a> that most adult native speakers only have a vocabulary of between 20,000\u201335,000 words. Defining precisely what we mean by a \u2018word\u2019<\/a> is no mean feat, of course, but even so there is a huge chasm between these two figures.<\/p>\n

So, if speakers of English typically know between 12 and 20% of the words recorded in the OED<\/em>, one might understandably assume that there really wouldn\u2019t be any need to go about creating new ones. Yet barely a day goes by when we don\u2019t encounter a new word in some form or another, whether that be a word that is eventually fully adopted into the language, an \u2018incorrect\u2019 word, or even a one-time use word created on the spur of the moment, perhaps for comic effect.<\/p>\n

But when we hear a new word for the first time, how are we supposed to know what it means?<\/p>\n

Well, this partly depends on how the new word was formed. If the new word is a \u2018blend<\/a>\u2019, then the meaning of the new word might be easily recoverable from its component parts, particularly if aided by context. For instance, the meaning of hangry<\/em><\/strong> (angry or frustrated due to hunger) would be quite transparent in \u2018We ordered our food over an hour ago. What\u2019s going on? I\u2019m beginning to feel really hangry\u2019<\/em>, even if you\u2019d never come across the word before. (NB. Given the findings in a hot-off-the-press article<\/a> from less than a month ago, however, it would appear that the concept of hangriness<\/strong><\/em> is a little more involved that the component words might suggest!)<\/p>\n

\"\"
A hangry cat<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a similar vein, when a work colleague, who often takes the same train to work as me, suggested that we should trainstorm<\/em><\/strong> ideas during our commute, both the activity and the location were neatly conveyed in a single word that I immediately understood, despite the fact that I\u2019d never heard it before and may never hear it again.<\/p>\n

Likewise, if the word you\u2019re hearing for the first time follows the general rules of the language, then it is usually a straightforward task to understand what is really meant. This scenario certainly applies when interpreting child language, which often follows language-internal rules even where they should be overridden by irregular forms, e.g. I goed to the shop and buyed a toy<\/em>). This was illustrated fairly recently by my three-year-old daughter who, after lining up all her soft toy animals on the edge of her bed, proudly announced that she was the petshopper<\/em><\/strong> and asked if I would like to buy a pet.<\/p>\n

But new words may also \u2018break the rules\u2019 as it were, and still be easy for us to interpret, perhaps by analogy with another similar word. At some point in time, in the not too distant past, what I presume must have been a well-paid marketing team came up with the notion of sun-blushed<\/em><\/strong> tomatoes<\/em>. It\u2019s a wonderful word which conveys a sense of sweetness from having been sat in the sun for a while, but a juiciness from not having been dried out in the same way as sun-dried tomatoes (compare the two images below \u2013 I know which ones I would prefer!). However, the verb to blush<\/em> is intransitive, which means it shouldn\u2019t be allowed to take an object. We can say \u2018the sun dried the tomatoes\u2019<\/em>, but we can\u2019t say \u2018the sun blushed the tomatoes\u2019<\/em> (and perhaps this is why the term \u2018sunblush\u2019 is also quite common nowadays). But by analogy to things that have been sun-dried or, more poetically, sun-kissed, it just works.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Shrivelled sun-dried tomatoes vs. juicy sun-blushed tomatoes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And if you\u2019re Nigella, of course, you might take this process one step further and come up with your own recipe<\/a> for moonblush<\/em><\/strong> tomatoes. These are tomatoes that have been cooked overnight (hence the reference to the moon) in the residual heat of a cooling oven (NB. there are no known cases of anyone having successfully used this method of cooking tomatoes prior to sundown). Google the term<\/a> \u2018moonblush\u2019 and you\u2019ll get 174,000 hits, a vast number of which will reference Nigella Lawson in some way, showing just how unique the word is!<\/p>\n

Yet another category of new words are those which, on the surface, appear to follow some rule of word formation in the language, but actually leave you scratching your head when you encounter them for the first time, wondering what they mean. This scenario is often symptomatic of the word having been purposefully coined by someone, say for marketing purposes, who didn\u2019t foresee the potential confusion.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Postcrete = fence post concrete<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On a recent trip to a DIY store, I spotted big bags of postcrete<\/em><\/strong>. Since I wasn\u2019t there to buy said product, I could have just ignored it, but as a linguist I am, unfortunately, subject to the occupational hazard of being unable to go about my daily life without questioning such things. I realised it had something to do with concrete, for obvious reasons \u2013 well, I suppose it could have been somehow related to Crete \u2013 and so began thinking to myself \u2018I wonder<\/em> what is used <\/em>before that?\u2019<\/em> I\u2019d assumed the post<\/em> part of the word was being used as a prefix indicating \u2018after in time or in order\u2019. Only later did I learn it was a special fast-setting concrete for bedding in fence posts!<\/p>\n

\"\"
Thinking of detoxing? Be prepared!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Similar confusion ensued when a colleague saw an advertisement which said \u201cwhy detox, when you can pretox<\/strong>?\u201d<\/em> Presumably by analogy with detox<\/em>, itself a relatively new word meaning the removal of toxins from one\u2019s body, it did at first glance seem like the advert was recommending the opposite, i.e. to add toxins to one\u2019s body. Using pretox <\/em>as a verb probably contributed to the confusion, since words beginning with pre <\/em>in English are almost invariably verbs meaning do x prior to something else <\/em>(e.g. precook, preboard, prebook).<\/p>\n

Finally, there will always be new words that we have never heard before and whose meaning we are unable to deduce from our existing knowledge of the language. I experienced this just two days ago when the word peng<\/em><\/strong> was mentioned in a TV commercial. Fortunately, in this digital age, those of us who are more chronologically gifted than secondary school pupils have the Urban Dictionary<\/a> on hand to help out.<\/p>\n

So, while new words may arise for all manner of reasons and in all manner of contexts, perhaps the most remarkable thing about them is our (almost) unfailing capacity to understand them despite never having heard them uttered before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Words are all around us. And there are a lot of them out there! The Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for over 170,000 words in current use and over 47,000 obsolete words. Yet, surprisingly, the Economist newspaper reports that most adult native speakers only have a vocabulary of between 20,000\u201335,000 words. Defining precisely what we mean by a \u2018word\u2019 is no mean feat, of course, but even so there is a huge chasm between these two figures. So, if…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[50],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions\/398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}