Have you Hugged a Word Today?

As a linguist, it was very intriguing and heart warming to hear a lexicographer talk about words in such a caring manner. Taking on the sentiment that no word should be left behind. All words should be included. Which begs the question: what is a word. Well the best place to consult would be the dictionary: “something that is said”. Is one definition. Well I am sure that there is more to it than that. But irregardless…

Of course the love of words is of varying degrees. Some people use words indiscriminately. Like grabbing for a pair of pliers to hammer in a nail, some people will look for a word in their mental dictionary and just pick the one that is most convenient which may not be a bad thing. In the recent months I have heard the word “ask” used as a noun, as in “What is the ask?” as opposed to What is your request or What are you asking for?. So now “ask” has become a noun. More recently, though, I heard a coworker of mine utter the word “bucketize” as in to categorize something. Why not, to place something into a specific bucket?

So our speaker Erin McKean has invited us to discover and invent new words like “bucketize”. So invent I have. Take the word “dis-obviate”. The word “obviate” means to make unnecessary, but the process of making something once obviated into something needed could be called “dis-obviated”. I made that up, you know. This is my contribution to the English language.

How many of us have heard form our teachers or parents or someone who we viewed as an authority say, “That’s not in the dictionary!” As if to say that the dictionary was the orthodoxy of words (am I using that correctly, “orthodoxy”?), apparently, so. I consulted the dictionary. Webster's no less. Well how do you think words are created? The Dictionary (yes, and this sentence is ungrammatical, but let’s not go there right now). Do you think that there was some dictionary handed to us from Mount Sinai on stone tablets? That would be a lot of stone tablets. No. I’m not referring to the Rosetta Stone, but close. No, words are created out of necessity in some instances and in other instances come from other languages like “anime” which is a Japanized-English word meaning a cartoon “animation” that has returned home to the good old U. S. of A. with squinty little slanted eyes (I get to say that because I am Asian).

Ah, but we come now to another ancient feud which is of course the good old Anglicized words as opposed to Latinized words. Why instead of saying “straight teaching” should we say “orthodox”? Does that make unorthodox teachings gay (not in the sexual sense of the word)? No, but a little redundant. Don’t worry, it gets worse. We all know that milk is sometimes homogeneous but that homo sapiens or homo geniuses does not mean geniuses that are all the same. Well that is because homogeneous is Greek meaning the same all over, and homo genius (if there were such a species, we are making new words here not species, but if it did exist I would belong to it) is Latin , in other words Roman. In Greek “homo” means the same where as in Latin the word “homo” means man or human. Wait, weren’t we talking about new words and not ancients words? Yes, but many new words are in fact recombined words like the word above: “dis-obviate”. Wait, is "dis-ovulate" a word?

So instead of planting a tree, invent a word, or better yet do both and don’t worry about how orthodox a word is (hey, "orthodix" would be a straight penis..hum?), create one even if you are not ovulating or for that matter obvulating. Have fun with words. But it doesn’t count if you are playing Scrabble.