Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be discussing a
Speaker 1: linguistic subject, some linguistic inventions. And I thought it would
Speaker 1: be a good idea to begin with some good malapropisms.
Speaker 1: I love a good malapropism, and we're of course not
Speaker 1: above coining one here and there ourselves on the show sometimes.
Speaker 1: Uh So, what's a malapropism before we get into our
Speaker 1: favorite examples. It's the usually unintentionally humorous misuse or distortion
Speaker 1: of a word or phrase. So usually it's a word
Speaker 1: or phrase that sounds like what you mean to say,
Speaker 1: but is not what you mean to say. For example,
Speaker 1: Jesus healing the leopards. That's a great one. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: often used to comedic effect, like you, like you mentioned
Speaker 1: and uh sometimes you'll see the latter. This idea of
Speaker 1: it being a phrase defined is a malla for like
Speaker 1: a metaphor. Also it sounds delicious, right though we have
Speaker 1: to stress that malafor itself is an invented word and
Speaker 1: potentially uh and I'll appropism in and of itself. Oh,
Speaker 1: I can see that, like somebody was trying to say malapropism,
Speaker 1: but they got confused and said malaf right, or or
Speaker 1: they just intentionally did it. And we'll get into some
Speaker 1: of the more intentional acts of this as we go.
Speaker 1: The Sopranos is a great source of very memorable malapropisms.
Speaker 1: I like when there's part where Christopher Multa Santi talks
Speaker 1: about creating a little dysentery in the ranks, which that
Speaker 1: one reminds me of one about scientology, the the idea
Speaker 1: that l Ron Hubbard had the philosophy of diuretics. But
Speaker 1: there's another one in the Sopranos where the character Little
Speaker 1: Carmines he's talking about seeing in the horror movie and
Speaker 1: he says it juxtaposes the sacred in the propane. Or
Speaker 1: there's a part where Tony describes his mom as an
Speaker 1: alba core around my neck. Oh, instead of an albatross.
Speaker 1: Very good. This is more of a phrase. But I
Speaker 1: instantly thought of the of The Big Lebowski when he's
Speaker 1: he points out the Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women. Um,
Speaker 1: the code of the Corner Brothers paint with this sort
Speaker 1: of brush a lot in their dialogue. I was reading
Speaker 1: a little bit about this lip. Basically I was looking
Speaker 1: for some more examples of of of malapropisms in the
Speaker 1: Coen Brothers work, and I ran across this Senses of
Speaker 1: Cinema post by Paul Coughland from several years back, and
Speaker 1: he described the Cohen Brothers use of dialogue as quote
Speaker 1: the dialogue of wonderful inarticulacy. That's about right. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: you'll also another place you see a lot of malapropism
Speaker 1: is that you'll see it sometimes used as part of
Speaker 1: racial stereotypes. One example that comes to mind, and you
Speaker 1: see this listed on various like trope websites, is the
Speaker 1: Fisher Stevens role in the Short Circuits movies. I've never
Speaker 1: seen Short Circuit. Well it's probably alright, there's no reason
Speaker 1: to go back to these, but these were a force
Speaker 1: movies about about a robot, like they become self aware
Speaker 1: and it has like a laser cannon on its shoulder
Speaker 1: and it's like a puppet. Does it do cute robot malapropisms? No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't. But Fisher Stevens plays Um, an Indian scientist,
Speaker 1: uh and and he's this this uh, you know this
Speaker 1: this uh, this accent, and he's he just busts out
Speaker 1: a number of these and ultimately, you know it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of like this idea, the comedic racial stereotype of
Speaker 1: someone who doesn't have a great grasp on the English
Speaker 1: language and therefore stumbles into all of these. That's unfortunately,
Speaker 1: but the use of melopropisms in fiction does go way
Speaker 1: way back. Like Shakespeare used malapropisms a lot. The character
Speaker 1: of Dogberry and Much Ado about Nothing famously delivers a
Speaker 1: bunch of these and their grades. So Dogberry is this
Speaker 1: incompetent night constable and he's supposed to be I think
Speaker 1: a satire on the amateur police forces of Elizabethan times,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the humor comes through and him
Speaker 1: giving confused orders like um, he when he's trying to
Speaker 1: get one of his deputies to apprehend all vagrants, but
Speaker 1: instead he says, you are to comprehend all vagram men
Speaker 1: um and he he tells them to be vigetant. I
Speaker 1: beseech you uh. And then there's a great part later
Speaker 1: where he claims that a bad dude will be condemned
Speaker 1: into everlasting redemption. Well, there's a. There's fun to be
Speaker 1: had with with with malopropisms, right, because you can sort
Speaker 1: of you can have your character fumble into something saying
Speaker 1: something a little more articulate than I mean to it. Times. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, Like the idea of everlasting redemption is sort
Speaker 1: of a cool metaphor, even though he just is screwing
Speaker 1: up words. But after this character. Actually, since sometime in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, malapropisms have also been known as dog
Speaker 1: barry is ums. There was another one I came across
Speaker 1: that I'd never read before. But this is from the
Speaker 1: real world. So former Texas Governor and U. S. Energy
Speaker 1: Secretary Rick Perry. He's famous for the for saying the
Speaker 1: oops when he couldn't remember something. But also, um, that's
Speaker 1: not what I was bringing up. On August there was
Speaker 1: an article in the Texas Tribune by John Reynolds that
Speaker 1: reported that Perry had been speaking to a crowd and
Speaker 1: at this event, he told the crowd, quote, we need
Speaker 1: to look at the states, which are the lavatories of
Speaker 1: innovation and democracy. Uh yeah, so what what with that?
Speaker 1: If we were to take that literally, like, what would
Speaker 1: that even mean? Uh? I think that's the other thing.
Speaker 1: The part of it too, is like, even if they're
Speaker 1: not quite accidentally profound, we can't help a puzzle over
Speaker 1: it because it will inject a bizarre metaphor mental image
Speaker 1: into our head and then we're just forced to wrestle
Speaker 1: with it. Right now, there are also just lots of
Speaker 1: these people making regular everyday speech. We probably do them
Speaker 1: all the time. Everybody does them. One of my favorites
Speaker 1: I ran across was the idea of all the people
Speaker 1: who died in the blue Bonnet plague. Uh see. I
Speaker 1: saw that in the notes, and I didn't even get
Speaker 1: it until said it out loud now, and that that
Speaker 1: points out an interesting thing, which is that there there
Speaker 1: are multiple different ways that people put together malapropisms. Like
Speaker 1: I was reading a paper by the linguist Arnold Mzuki
Speaker 1: on classical malapropisms, and Swiki points out that lots of
Speaker 1: malapropisms are just approximations that come out of our mouths
Speaker 1: due to the tip of the tongue effect. This is
Speaker 1: something we've talked about on Stuff to Blow your Mind before.
Speaker 1: You can go back and find our episode on that
Speaker 1: if you google it, I'm sure, but the short version
Speaker 1: is you are failing to call the correct word from memory,
Speaker 1: and by accident you employ a similar sounding word instead.
Speaker 1: You can often hear this, especially in people who may
Speaker 1: have been having a bit of alcohol to drink. Like
Speaker 1: Often words that get swapped start with the same letters
Speaker 1: or sounds, like you know, uh, this database is a
Speaker 1: vast suppository of information. I guess actually that wouldn't start
Speaker 1: with the same sound, but you know, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. But other times malapropisms have more unique ideologies.
Speaker 1: For example, when somebody learns a word or phrase by
Speaker 1: mishearing it and then never corrects their original misimpression. I
Speaker 1: know this has happened multiple times in my life. Blue
Speaker 1: bonnet plague would probably be a good example here. It
Speaker 1: suggests that somebody heard somebody talking about the bubonic plague
Speaker 1: but misheard how they pronounced it, and then just never
Speaker 1: got corrected on that. Yeah, I think we can all
Speaker 1: relate to that. We all have examples of that in
Speaker 1: our our own life. Totally. But while malpropisms are themselves
Speaker 1: a normal part of speech, they go back into the
Speaker 1: mist of history. Everybody does them, and everybody's been doing
Speaker 1: them for thousands of years. Probably the name we use
Speaker 1: for them has a very distinct origin in history, and
Speaker 1: that origin lies with an Irish satirist playwright and politician
Speaker 1: named Richard Brinsley Sheridan who lived from seventeen fifty one
Speaker 1: to eighteen sixteen. Sheridan wrote a number of successful comedies,
Speaker 1: but his seventeen seventy five play called The Rivals introduced
Speaker 1: the world to a character named Mrs Malaprop, whom another
Speaker 1: character says is infamous for delivering words quote so ingeniously
Speaker 1: misapplied without being mispronounced. So, for example, Mrs Malaprop calls
Speaker 1: one other character the very pineapple of politeness, and at
Speaker 1: another point she refers to an allegory lying on the
Speaker 1: banks of the nile, which we should point out gets
Speaker 1: it wrong twice because the nile has crocodiles, not alligators.
Speaker 1: Oh I didn't even get that one at first. Allegory
Speaker 1: and alligators. Okay, I think that joke works better on
Speaker 1: people who are less obsessed with crocodilians than you and I.
Speaker 1: Uh so. So it seems that most usage of the
Speaker 1: term malapropism in English actually dates back to this character
Speaker 1: in a late eighteenth century Irish play. Maybe all usage
Speaker 1: of it, but of course the name Mrs malaprop is
Speaker 1: built out of existing words borrowed from other languages, like uh,
Speaker 1: there's the there's this expression malapropos, meaning inappropriate, originally from
Speaker 1: the French, where it would mean something like out of
Speaker 1: place or a miss. But from the name of this
Speaker 1: character we now get the label that we use specifically
Speaker 1: for malapropisms, words used wrong in this way. And so
Speaker 1: today we wanted to look at the phenomenon of invented
Speaker 1: words like the word malapropism. There are tons of words
Speaker 1: like this, you know. There there are some words that
Speaker 1: enter the lexicon from works of fiction or mythology. There
Speaker 1: are words that enter through deliberate coinage where somebody is
Speaker 1: trying to create a term for a previously unnamed concept.
Speaker 1: There are words that enter their changes in technology and
Speaker 1: science and culture. And we wanted to talk about some
Speaker 1: of our favorite stories of these words and explore how
Speaker 1: they differ from other types of words. What what does
Speaker 1: it take to invent a successful word and are there
Speaker 1: any parallels to the invention of a successful piece of technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a fascinating topic because it's, you know, the
Speaker 1: world of language. It is a world that is invented,
Speaker 1: like all wor words are essentially invented. Um. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I agree with you there, because they
Speaker 1: all do come from human brains. But I would say
Speaker 1: maybe some words could be thought of more like features
Speaker 1: of the human body, that maybe they just emerged from
Speaker 1: us at some point in history without us trying to
Speaker 1: find a word for something. That's true. The more the
Speaker 1: sort of primal roots of language, which will be discussing.
Speaker 1: But but still it's it's it's unlike most of the
Speaker 1: other topics we've done. I don't know if we've done
Speaker 1: a linguistic episode of invention yet, have we? I don't
Speaker 1: know that there are obviously linguistic inventions. All Right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: All right, We're back, all right. So we'd like to
Speaker 1: start by asking what came before? Uh? And I guess
Speaker 1: in this case we would have to ask where do
Speaker 1: words usually come from when they're not being deliberately coined
Speaker 1: or invented by somebody. We know that most words are
Speaker 1: not deliberate inventions. Obviously, the the deep origins of language
Speaker 1: that's a massive and complicated subject, limited in large part
Speaker 1: to inform speculations since we don't have physical evidence to
Speaker 1: to discover or to refer to. You know, spoken words
Speaker 1: don't leave fossils. Uh, And it's it's too big to
Speaker 1: address at length today. But by setting linguistics within the
Speaker 1: timeline of history, especially with the help of written sources,
Speaker 1: we can learn a lot about how languages change over
Speaker 1: time and about where words come from. And one thing
Speaker 1: that I think is extremely interesting is that many scholars
Speaker 1: have noticed important parallels between the evolution of languages and
Speaker 1: the evolution of species. In biology, there are important differences
Speaker 1: as well, But just to mention one of these similarities,
Speaker 1: like the living organisms on Earth, many of Earth's languages
Speaker 1: show signs of having a common ancestor. We can show
Speaker 1: signs of common ancestry and all living things on Earth
Speaker 1: by comparing similarities in the genes and observing how those
Speaker 1: genes change over time through evolution. Likewise, we can observe
Speaker 1: similarities in some words and formations that many languages separated
Speaker 1: over vast distances, seem to share, and observe how those
Speaker 1: pronunciations and semantics change over time. And in fact, the
Speaker 1: kind of strange thing is that it was obvious that
Speaker 1: languages evolve over time from common ancestors. Before it was
Speaker 1: obvious that plants and animals do this because you know,
Speaker 1: it was obvious because linguists could track these changes through
Speaker 1: written sources from history. They could see for themselves how
Speaker 1: words and usages and whole languages morphed over the centuries.
Speaker 1: Charles Darwin actually wrote in The Descent of Man, quote
Speaker 1: the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and
Speaker 1: the proofs that both have been developed through the gradual
Speaker 1: process are curiously parallel. I was reading a good article
Speaker 1: about this by John whit Field in Plos Biology from
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight called across the Curious parallel of
Speaker 1: language and species evolution and uh so Whitfield's writing about
Speaker 1: this subject and uh In addition to common ancestry and
Speaker 1: changes to words and genes over time, another parallel that
Speaker 1: Whitfield points out is that quote, their most important components
Speaker 1: show the least variation. In biology, this means that genes,
Speaker 1: such as those involved in the machinery of protein synthesis,
Speaker 1: so basically something every organism has to do all the time,
Speaker 1: change so slowly that they can be used to discern
Speaker 1: the relationships of groups that diverged hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: years ago. Likewise, the most commonly used words, such as
Speaker 1: numbers and pronouns, changed the most slowly. Yeah, I thought
Speaker 1: that was really interesting. I mean, other words, you can
Speaker 1: find other words that seem to persist in fairly stable
Speaker 1: forms over long periods of time, and they very often
Speaker 1: are common words. You know, words like for family relationships,
Speaker 1: words for things like mother and father, and uh for
Speaker 1: you know, things that would be referred to very often
Speaker 1: in everyday speech. The whereas it's the more specific terms
Speaker 1: that may go extinct over time right or face dramatic substitutions.
Speaker 1: Uh So, Today more than half of the world's population
Speaker 1: speaks a language that shares as a common ancestor and
Speaker 1: extinct language called Indo European. One fun example I was
Speaker 1: reading about in a Nautilus article from last year by
Speaker 1: Sevinga Norkiya Zova was about the word honey. So, of course,
Speaker 1: the word honey is honey in English. In Sanskrit it's madhu,
Speaker 1: in Russian it's meod. And to bring it back to English,
Speaker 1: we have mead, an alcoholic drink made out of honey.
Speaker 1: In Sanskrit, Russian, and even in English you've got these
Speaker 1: links that you know, words are still basically very similar.
Speaker 1: Another interest in fact from that article, UH, a professor
Speaker 1: of linguistics at New York University named Gregory Guy talks
Speaker 1: about the word locks, which in English, of course means
Speaker 1: you know, smoked salmon, you'd have your bagel with locks.
Speaker 1: But apparently locks is basically the same word as it
Speaker 1: was in proto into European eight thousand years ago, where
Speaker 1: it was probably pronounced locks and it meant salmon like
Speaker 1: eight thousand years ago. It's interesting to the way both
Speaker 1: of these examples are foods. There are things that are
Speaker 1: concepts that that that are for things that we we
Speaker 1: not only conceive of, but we actually take into our body.
Speaker 1: We have such a complete sensory understanding of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's an interesting point to things that would have been
Speaker 1: delicious from ancient times. But anyway, based on this biological analogy,
Speaker 1: I want to use an analogy for the purpose of
Speaker 1: the rest of this episode, which is basically biological evolution
Speaker 1: versus genetic engineering. Most new words that enter all language
Speaker 1: do so through a process more akin to biological evolution.
Speaker 1: They somehow arise naturally among speakers rather than as you know,
Speaker 1: genetically engineered. You know, we we created a giant scorpion
Speaker 1: as a government weapon or something, you know, the great
Speaker 1: b movie plot. Um than these genetic engineering projects, and
Speaker 1: and those would be more akin to what we're ultimately
Speaker 1: going to focus on the attempts to create a new
Speaker 1: word on purpose. But let's focus on the biological evolution
Speaker 1: version first. So when language is evolved naturally, what happens
Speaker 1: at the word to word level? Where do new words
Speaker 1: come from if nobody is trying to coin them on purpose? Well,
Speaker 1: of course, on our show we've we've discussed plenty of
Speaker 1: times if you're looking to invent something new, you can
Speaker 1: always just steal something which has already been invented. And yeah,
Speaker 1: most inventions are just stealing ideas from other people. Uh,
Speaker 1: and or maybe making a very slight modification. So a
Speaker 1: very common source of new word is borrowing from existing languages. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and these are also known as loan words. Uh. And
Speaker 1: one one fun example of this, or at least I
Speaker 1: find it fun. I don't know your your mileage may vary,
Speaker 1: but um, earworm is one at all? Here? Well well,
Speaker 1: well I'm just kidding. That's that's great. Wrong, earworms are
Speaker 1: an example of this. Now it's technically a calic that's
Speaker 1: suspelled c A l q u E, which is a
Speaker 1: specialized version of this in which the original word in
Speaker 1: another language is is. It's not just a matter of
Speaker 1: taking the say that the German word for something and
Speaker 1: using it. It's directly translating it literal, literally word for word.
Speaker 1: Other examples of this would be brainwashing or Adam's apple.
Speaker 1: But with earworm it stems from the German or verm,
Speaker 1: which may have originated with German operetta composer Paul Linkey,
Speaker 1: but didn't enter the popular lexicon um until like the
Speaker 1: early two thousands. Prior to all of this, or verms
Speaker 1: were insects of the order uh dermap tira. Ear wigs
Speaker 1: probably named because well, there's one theory is that they
Speaker 1: have the their hind wings are kind of ear like.
Speaker 1: If you fold them out, they kind of look like
Speaker 1: a human ear. But the more likely explanation is that
Speaker 1: you have this old wives tale about them crawling into
Speaker 1: human ears and laying eggs inside your brain, which of
Speaker 1: course becomes part of the idea of like, what is
Speaker 1: a song you hear and you can't get it out?
Speaker 1: Of your head. It is kind of like a small
Speaker 1: insect that has crawled in through your ear into your brain.
Speaker 1: It's like those things in con Yeah exactly, but really,
Speaker 1: your wigs don't do this, right, No, No, there's no
Speaker 1: I think they will, uh from based on the research
Speaker 1: I was looking at, I think they will occasionally you
Speaker 1: can get one in your ear. I would refer back
Speaker 1: to our stuff to Blow your mind episode which I
Speaker 1: think will be rerunning soon, about insects crawling inside of
Speaker 1: body cavities. It happens, it can happen, but not not
Speaker 1: to the degree that wives tales would have you believe.
Speaker 1: And not eggs in the brain. No, no eggs in
Speaker 1: the brain. We need another phrase, by the way, that's
Speaker 1: a that's an unfortunate phrase because who knows our wives
Speaker 1: really saying this? Yeah, it is. It is sexist terminology.
Speaker 1: Let's just say old folk beliefs and hearsay old starship
Speaker 1: captain's tales. Um So. English itself is actually composed of
Speaker 1: a huge number of words borrowed from other languages. And
Speaker 1: it's not just interesting terms like earworm right. Tons of
Speaker 1: everyday terminology is descended from words that were borrowed into English.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of years ago. English originally was a West Germanic language,
Speaker 1: and and these roots or where we get a lot
Speaker 1: of the origins of common basic short words that still
Speaker 1: exist in English today. But tons of other words in
Speaker 1: English come from other languages. So here's one that I
Speaker 1: was just thinking about. What do you call the album
Speaker 1: Black Sabbath by the band Black Sabbath, on which the
Speaker 1: song black Sabba it appears. It sounds like a trick question.
Speaker 1: I think the answer is Black Sabbath. It's the eponymous album, right, yeah, eponymous,
Speaker 1: But of course eponymous, that's a that's a word taken
Speaker 1: directly from words in Greek. So that's like a Greek
Speaker 1: loan word. In English, it means to give one's name
Speaker 1: to um. And in a way, it's funny to try
Speaker 1: to list words in English borrowed from other languages, because
Speaker 1: it would make more sense, really to try to list
Speaker 1: the words not borrowed from other languages, descending directly from
Speaker 1: Germanic roots, because the vast majority of English words at
Speaker 1: this point are borrowed. By some estimates, borrowed words make
Speaker 1: up about eighty percent or more of the language, and
Speaker 1: some of these words have been borrowed for a very
Speaker 1: long time. Many came from languages like French and Latin
Speaker 1: hundreds of years ago. The big point of linguistic cross
Speaker 1: pollination here is the Norman conquest of England in the
Speaker 1: eleventh century, where Norman French suddenly became the language of
Speaker 1: government into the ruling class in England. And so this
Speaker 1: legacy still exists in English today, where you have tons
Speaker 1: of words having multiple synonyms for the same concept. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you have a kind of like every day version
Speaker 1: of the word that comes from Old English, and then
Speaker 1: a more formal or official sounding version of the word
Speaker 1: that comes from the French. So like a holdover from
Speaker 1: a time when both languages had to exist together at
Speaker 1: the same time and the same heads and off the
Speaker 1: same lips. Yeah, and then the French derivative ones were
Speaker 1: generally the ones in power, the ones with money, and
Speaker 1: the ones with administrative authority. So uh, you get like
Speaker 1: buy and purchase by from the old English, purchase from
Speaker 1: the old French, where you've got dead versus deceased, dead
Speaker 1: from the Old English, deceased from the old French. Where
Speaker 1: you've got wild from the Old English versus savage from
Speaker 1: the old French. But that's a wonderful point about the
Speaker 1: idea that that or more of the language is just
Speaker 1: word that come from other languages. It it kind of
Speaker 1: creates this stone soup sort of scenario for English itself,
Speaker 1: like what what is there that is not something that
Speaker 1: was brought in to bulk up the recipe. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a great metaphor. But then ultimately, I mean it gets
Speaker 1: complicated because both Old English and Old French or Indo
Speaker 1: European languages meaning that so while you know, modern English
Speaker 1: has all these words that come from the French lineage
Speaker 1: of language development, ultimately both languages are thought to come
Speaker 1: from this hypothetical language a long time ago into European.
Speaker 1: So they split off, they formed different lineages, they formed
Speaker 1: different words that descended from each other, and then at
Speaker 1: some point in history they crossed and then entered each other.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a scenario where if you have
Speaker 1: like two films that come out and it both essentially
Speaker 1: retellings of the Odyssey or the retaellings of Baiwol or
Speaker 1: what have you, like, that's the that's in the genes
Speaker 1: of the thing. And then but then one sort of
Speaker 1: steals from the other, uh like that. So another common
Speaker 1: source of words ending up in the language is words
Speaker 1: derived from proper nouns. Something that was once the proper
Speaker 1: name of a person or a place gets drafted into
Speaker 1: a common word or phrase. An example here would be platonic.
Speaker 1: Think of a platonic relationship. Now, once this was understood
Speaker 1: to refer directly to ideas discussed by Plato, you're talking
Speaker 1: about the philosopher Plato. Now platonic does not really necessarily
Speaker 1: call Plato to mind. It's just an adjective, right, It
Speaker 1: just means, like, you know, a non sexual relationship, but platonic. One.
Speaker 1: Another example would be bohemian. Bohemia is a place. It's
Speaker 1: in the modern Czech Republic. But now the word Bohemian
Speaker 1: doesn't suggest to people anything about that place. So of
Speaker 1: course we still have examples of of words that they
Speaker 1: still have a direct tie to their source, like say Macavellian.
Speaker 1: When someone uses maca I don't know. I tend not
Speaker 1: define examples of people misusing it or using it in
Speaker 1: a general sense at least yet, but you could well
Speaker 1: imagine a future or you know, or a usage of
Speaker 1: Macavelli and that really is completely cut off from the
Speaker 1: original concepts. There's a good malapropism of machiavellianos where where
Speaker 1: somebody's like, that's what Prince Macchiavelli said, but I think
Speaker 1: he wasn't a prince. He was the prince by Machiavelli
Speaker 1: actually just thought of another good proper name to common usage, denim.
Speaker 1: Denim originally is like from day nime. It's like from
Speaker 1: a place. Oh I didn't know that. Yeah, okay, well,
Speaker 1: oh well, as long as we're talking about about products,
Speaker 1: I mean there's of course, Champagne is another example, right,
Speaker 1: it's a great one where it's officially it's supposed to
Speaker 1: be tied to the Champagne region, but it is often
Speaker 1: just used generically. Now it's just a common now it
Speaker 1: means bubbly wine. Yeah um yeah. But so another thing
Speaker 1: that a great source of new words in this sort
Speaker 1: of natural evolution version is back formation. I love this.
Speaker 1: Back Formation is when a new word is born when
Speaker 1: a prefix or suffix is removed from an existing word
Speaker 1: in order to create a new one. Often because people
Speaker 1: just assume that these new words already exist because of
Speaker 1: linguistic cues. So people create a new word thinking it's
Speaker 1: already a word, not realizing that it's not one. So
Speaker 1: here's one that I really like, the verb lace, as
Speaker 1: in to use a laser. Okay, so this is thinking like,
Speaker 1: all right, you have the terminator. What's the terminator? Do
Speaker 1: he terminates? What's the laser? Do lasers the heck out
Speaker 1: of stuff? Exactly? You've got a fire poker? What do
Speaker 1: you do with a poker? You poke? So you've got
Speaker 1: a laser. The surgeon has a laser. What do they
Speaker 1: do with it? They lace the patient's eye. And this
Speaker 1: is a word. Now people use the verb lace all
Speaker 1: the time. It's a but it is a back formation.
Speaker 1: The word laser is not like the word poker. Laser
Speaker 1: is actually an acronym standing for light amplification by stimulated
Speaker 1: emission of radiation. But because of its similarity to these
Speaker 1: other nouns with a similar spelling that end with e
Speaker 1: er like poker, it got back formed into a verb.
Speaker 1: And of course this example also shows another new way
Speaker 1: that words are formed acronyms. Right, laser was originally an acronym.
Speaker 1: Now it's not, you know it, Laser is just a word.
Speaker 1: People don't capitalize that. They don't put periods between the letters.
Speaker 1: It's just a laser. I was reading about another fun
Speaker 1: back formation. This is the kind of back formation known
Speaker 1: as a false singular. And the example here is the
Speaker 1: English word P, as in p soup. So originally the
Speaker 1: Middle English word was piece p E a s e
Speaker 1: and this would be the noun that worked as a
Speaker 1: singular or a collective, like the word corn, or like
Speaker 1: the word wheat. So you could have a bowl of peace,
Speaker 1: or you could have a single piece kernel. Well, because
Speaker 1: plural words in modern English end in s sound, people
Speaker 1: began to assume sometimes the seventeenth century that peace must
Speaker 1: be the plural word for the singular P, and then
Speaker 1: the word P was thus created. This type of origin again,
Speaker 1: this is the false singular. A similar thing would happen
Speaker 1: if people started assuming that the singular of moose must
Speaker 1: be moo, as opposed to nieces or of course moose
Speaker 1: another one that I really like. How about truncation also
Speaker 1: known as shortening or clipping. This is when new words
Speaker 1: are created by cutting chunks out of existing words. So
Speaker 1: mayonnaise becomes mayo, examination becomes exam, refrigerator becomes fridge, robot
Speaker 1: becomes bot, application becomes app advertisement, becomes ad. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: also see stuff like bicycle and bike, rhinoceros and rhino
Speaker 1: or brother becomes bro or bra. One of my favorites.
Speaker 1: That also the one that I think it's I find
Speaker 1: just so humorous is um when pizza becomes za. I
Speaker 1: don't know if actual humans use this or if it's
Speaker 1: just like Ninja turtles, but uh, I like to bust
Speaker 1: it out for groans now and again, never pay for
Speaker 1: la pizza man. Uh. Here's another one blending existing words,
Speaker 1: pretty straightforward. You take incomplete parts of words and smash
Speaker 1: them together. Breakfast and lunch becomes brunch, Spoon and fork
Speaker 1: becomes spork. Podcast itself, we're on a podcast that is
Speaker 1: a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast, and some would classify
Speaker 1: this particular podcast as infotainment, which is of course a
Speaker 1: combination of information and entertainment. So you got a lot
Speaker 1: of fun a portmanteau from hell. Yeah, you see a
Speaker 1: lot of this in You know, a place where you
Speaker 1: see a lot of language generation is the business world,
Speaker 1: where you know you have a new product or a
Speaker 1: new approach. It needs a new title and needs a
Speaker 1: new a new word for this. On sept And A
Speaker 1: great way to create it is to just crash two
Speaker 1: things together and see how they fit. Are you not infota? Okay?
Speaker 1: One more natural source of new words on amotopia. This
Speaker 1: is what we call it when a word is formed
Speaker 1: by sounding like the thing it's referring to. So plink
Speaker 1: honk hiss, the word imitates the sound of the concept.
Speaker 1: I was trying to think do we form new on
Speaker 1: a mootopias this It seems like all the ones I
Speaker 1: can think of have been around for a while. Maybe
Speaker 1: we form them less often than some other types of words,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure we must form new ones every now
Speaker 1: and then. I was trying to think of a good
Speaker 1: modern example, and the one I thought of was I'll
Speaker 1: ping you about that later. So originally an automotopia from
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, this would, you know, refer to the
Speaker 1: sound of a bullet hitting metal or something ping, But
Speaker 1: because of conceptual or auditory similarities, it came to refer
Speaker 1: to things in the communications sphere, such as like a
Speaker 1: sonar communications between submarines or between network computer user. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: and I would be surprised if the modern resurgence of
Speaker 1: ping in the business world or in the workplace didn't
Speaker 1: have something to do with the ping like notification sounds
Speaker 1: and email and chat apps. Uh. Yeah, I was trying
Speaker 1: to think of some more like some recent ones, and
Speaker 1: I was looking around at some examples of sort of
Speaker 1: modern lingo, and perhaps yeat is an example. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure what does that? What does that imitate? The sound of? Well? Okay,
Speaker 1: well let me define it for anyone so as the
Speaker 1: kids will use this term these days. According to uh,
Speaker 1: to my sources on the internet, it seems to be
Speaker 1: either a strong version of yes or to quote, throw
Speaker 1: something forcefully in a specified direction, as in I yeeded
Speaker 1: a cup of noodles across the room. Yeah, but like heat,
Speaker 1: like I can sort of, I'm not sure. I'm not
Speaker 1: positive that there's any um in anything to it, Like
Speaker 1: to throw something doesn't necessarily create the sound of yeat.
Speaker 1: But then when you start like trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how the sounds work in your head, you know, I
Speaker 1: can sort of half formulate a case for yeat being
Speaker 1: an actual sound. God, we sound so cool right now.
Speaker 1: I'll have to keep thinking about that one. Think about
Speaker 1: it the next time you throw something across the ring. Okay, alright,
Speaker 1: on that note, We're going to take one more break,
Speaker 1: but when we come back we will dive into some
Speaker 1: examples of intentionally invented words. All right, we're back. Okay.
Speaker 1: Now we've been looking at ways that words arise in
Speaker 1: language without being intentionally invented. When they arise through the process,
Speaker 1: that's more akin to biological evolution. But what about when
Speaker 1: we want to frankenstein some words just like make them
Speaker 1: in the lab um. So sort of going back to
Speaker 1: the business scenario, you've got a new product that you
Speaker 1: need to get out there, or you're rebranding another one
Speaker 1: and you gotta call it something. Well, I know somebody
Speaker 1: who would have been great at branding, and that's the
Speaker 1: English writer Horace Walpole, who lived from seventeen seventeen to
Speaker 1: seventeen uh And the term that he coined that everybody knows.
Speaker 1: He actually coined quite a few, but most of them
Speaker 1: are forgotten. The one that everybody knows is serendipity. And
Speaker 1: this comes from a letter that Walpole was writing to
Speaker 1: a friend named Horace Man, different from the American education reformer.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure I think this Horseman was a British diplomat.
Speaker 1: But the letter was dated January seventeen fifty four. And
Speaker 1: despite the magical delight of serendipity as a concept, I
Speaker 1: have to say the occasion by which he ends up
Speaker 1: describing it is incredibly dull. Basically, Walpole says that he
Speaker 1: accidentally discovered a historical link between two families while he
Speaker 1: was studying their coats of arms in a reference book.
Speaker 1: Earth shaking right. But he's writing about this process, and
Speaker 1: he says, quote, this discovery indeed is almost of that
Speaker 1: kind which I call serendipity, a very expressive word, which,
Speaker 1: as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall
Speaker 1: endeavor to explain to you. You will understand it better
Speaker 1: by the derivation than the definition. I once read a
Speaker 1: silly fairy tale called the Three Princes of serendip As
Speaker 1: their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries by accidents
Speaker 1: and sagacity of things which they were not in quest of.
Speaker 1: For instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind
Speaker 1: of the right eye had traveled the same road lately,
Speaker 1: because the grass was eaten only on the left side,
Speaker 1: where it was worse than on the right. Now do
Speaker 1: you understand serendipity. One of the most remarkable instances of
Speaker 1: this accidental sagacity, for you must observe that no discovery
Speaker 1: of a thing you were looking for comes under this description.
Speaker 1: Was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who, happening to dine at
Speaker 1: Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke
Speaker 1: of York and Mrs Hyde by the respect with which
Speaker 1: her mother treated her at table god riveting right dinner.
Speaker 1: How he treated her. Oh man, it's it's hard to
Speaker 1: believe the term really took off at all reading this,
Speaker 1: but it's a great term, right, because it really does
Speaker 1: describe something, the idea of a happy accident, that the
Speaker 1: occurrence or development of events by a thing that was,
Speaker 1: you know, in a way that's beneficial, but that was
Speaker 1: not intended by the agent. Yeah, like when you run
Speaker 1: into an old friend at a subway on a subway ride,
Speaker 1: you think this is exactly like a one eyed donkey
Speaker 1: eating grass on one side of the road. I think something,
Speaker 1: at least in the way I use the word. It's
Speaker 1: especially serendipitous if it's um a situation in which you know,
Speaker 1: in the course of trying to do one thing, especially
Speaker 1: if that thing is foolish or misguided, you actually accomplish
Speaker 1: something different and good. Yes, it's like the foolishness of
Speaker 1: the original errand that makes something especially serendipitous. But according
Speaker 1: to a post that excerpted from this letter in the
Speaker 1: Paris Review, the adjective form of the word serendipitous was
Speaker 1: not recorded until nineteen forty three. So that's a pretty
Speaker 1: big spend of time. And I wonder do intentionally invented
Speaker 1: words take longer on average to find all of their
Speaker 1: derived parts of speech. I don't know. I mean, it
Speaker 1: seems like they have to have a certain amount of
Speaker 1: sticking power to just like language is a living thing,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, so if you create a word and
Speaker 1: it doesn't take off, you know, if someone's out there
Speaker 1: not making it happen, like pushing it into the into
Speaker 1: the lexicon, Yeah, how does it ever gain a foothold? Well?
Speaker 1: I think about the fact that when a word feels organic,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to assume that it's derived different parts
Speaker 1: of speech already exist, right, that you're not making them
Speaker 1: up when you say them, Whereas when a word is
Speaker 1: something that you're aware of, as like an intentional recent coinage,
Speaker 1: you might be more likely to think, oh, serendipitous that's
Speaker 1: not a word. This is also probably the struggling point
Speaker 1: for ZA. Right. That's why why I think that I
Speaker 1: could be wrong that I don't think a lot of
Speaker 1: people are using ZA as an abbreviation for pizza just
Speaker 1: because it's it's It sounds fake, it doesn't seem helpful. Okay.
Speaker 1: So Walpole also provides early written evidence for some other terms,
Speaker 1: though not necessarily always of his intentional coinage. When I
Speaker 1: was reading about that I thought was great is from
Speaker 1: an article in The New Republic by David Crystal that's
Speaker 1: all about terms for drunkenness in English. A lot of
Speaker 1: these are forgotten, and this term comes from Walpole. The
Speaker 1: term is muckibus, meaning drunkenly sentimental, which is a good
Speaker 1: thing to have a word for, right, like you know,
Speaker 1: I love you man, No, I love you man. Muckibus
Speaker 1: uh sounds a little bit like sucky bus too, so
Speaker 1: it has this kind of like demonic of quality to
Speaker 1: it as well of the of the will being overpowered.
Speaker 1: Would you believe that this word comes from a dinner party.
Speaker 1: So it's an anecdote that Walpole shares in a letter
Speaker 1: to George Montague on April seventeen, fifty six, Walpole says,
Speaker 1: so he's at a dinner party, he's having supper. He
Speaker 1: overhears somebody named Lady Coventry saying that if she drank anymore,
Speaker 1: she would become mucky buss. And then somebody named lady
Speaker 1: Mary Coke asks what that means, and Coventry says that
Speaker 1: it was Irish for sentimental. Crystal writes quote. The mock
Speaker 1: Latin ending is known from other facetious eighteenth century slang formations,
Speaker 1: such as stinky buss, but there is no obvious connection
Speaker 1: with muck. Lady Coventry came from Ireland. The likelihood is
Speaker 1: that Walpole misheard a genuine Irish word, perhaps, and here
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do my best with an Irish word here
Speaker 1: queen yuck, which is spelled m A O I t
Speaker 1: h n e a c h Ireland to get it together.
Speaker 1: Come on, that's okay. I think it's ween yuck uh,
Speaker 1: and it means sentimental. Yeah, I should say. Crystal's article
Speaker 1: also mentions a bunch of other terms for drunkenness, including
Speaker 1: my new favorite uh not a loan word, not a
Speaker 1: new coinage, a classic Anglo Saxon word which is sim
Speaker 1: bell goal, meaning wanton with drink feasting. This one also
Speaker 1: sounds demonic in nature, which is I went to the
Speaker 1: Black Sabbath and I became Simon bell goal. Thinking about
Speaker 1: serendipity though, actually got me on the subject of another
Speaker 1: invented word that I really like. That comes from the
Speaker 1: American philosopher Daniel Dinnett, and it's his concept of a deepity.
Speaker 1: I think we've talked about this on Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind before, but I read about this idea in
Speaker 1: Dinnett's book called Intuition, Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking,
Speaker 1: remember discussing that. So a deepity is a special kind
Speaker 1: of equivocation. And of course equivocation is a word or
Speaker 1: phrase that's used in two different way as to a
Speaker 1: misleading effect. So you might say, like, um, why would
Speaker 1: you read all the arguments for and against Dennett's theory
Speaker 1: of consciousness? Isn't there enough arguing in the world? You know, uh,
Speaker 1: people people say stuff like this all the time, you
Speaker 1: know it hinges on two different meanings of the word argument.
Speaker 1: In one sense, an argument is just explaining why you
Speaker 1: think something's true. In another sense, it means like angry
Speaker 1: or acrimonious. So so that's an equivocation. Generally, a deepity
Speaker 1: is a specific kind of equivocation that you'll probably recognize
Speaker 1: immediately from your life. It's a statement that can either
Speaker 1: be interpreted as true and utterly trivial or profound and
Speaker 1: obviously false. Okay, but it but it takes advantage of
Speaker 1: like the good haves of both of these versions. So
Speaker 1: an example would be if somebody says love is just
Speaker 1: a word. So either you're talking about the word love,
Speaker 1: in which case this statement is true, but it is
Speaker 1: a banal truism and doesn't okay, so what, Yes, the
Speaker 1: word love is a word, or you're saying that the
Speaker 1: feeling of love is itself nothing more than a word,
Speaker 1: in which case the statement is stupid and nobody would
Speaker 1: bother paying any attention to you. There was I want
Speaker 1: to say on burto echo wrote something about or I
Speaker 1: can't remember if you wrote it or quoted it about
Speaker 1: some uh some some treatment on the on the rose
Speaker 1: uh saying like the first person to make this statement
Speaker 1: was quite possibly a genius and the second person to
Speaker 1: make it was an idiot. Um oh was he talking
Speaker 1: about nominalism though? With William Vacham in the name of
Speaker 1: the likely so, but yeah, it was. It was from
Speaker 1: I want to say it was from the introduction or
Speaker 1: the the afterword to the name of the rose, but
Speaker 1: it's since been whilst I've read that. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess. Another thing that's true is like with any statement,
Speaker 1: even an obviously stupid one, with enough effort, you can
Speaker 1: find something that that might be true about it a
Speaker 1: way of interpreting it, or if the the actor reciting
Speaker 1: the line is skilled enough, it can seem a lot
Speaker 1: more profound than it is, and you can be like, oh, man, yeah,
Speaker 1: love is just a word. I just heard Benedict Cumberbatch
Speaker 1: say it, and I'm feeling it hardcore. Right, It's totally different.
Speaker 1: Brian Cox could say it and I'd be like, oh,
Speaker 1: he's right. But if it's the actor who plays Badger
Speaker 1: on Breaking Bad, different story, entirely right. In fact, love
Speaker 1: is just a word is a great example because you
Speaker 1: can make tons of deepities with the X is just
Speaker 1: a y formulation. Lots of them are like this one
Speaker 1: example that we thankfully hear a lot less of than
Speaker 1: we used to. Like ten years ago, this was everywhere
Speaker 1: you looked. Evolution is just a theory. Remember this one.
Speaker 1: So it hinges on two different understandings of the word theory.
Speaker 1: One interpretation of the sentence is true but trivial. Another
Speaker 1: interpretation of the sentence, where theory means something like unfounded
Speaker 1: speculation would up end all of modern biology if it
Speaker 1: were true, but his pat ly false. Yeah, it does.
Speaker 1: That statement does tend to hinge on misunderstanding of what
Speaker 1: theories are and what role they play in our understanding
Speaker 1: of the world. Other things are not quite as obvious
Speaker 1: as a deepity, but feel vaguely deepity ish one that
Speaker 1: I was, one that I came across. His beauty is
Speaker 1: only skin deep like. In one sense, this could be
Speaker 1: saying physical beauty is only physical, which is true but
Speaker 1: not very profound. Or it could be saying beauty has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with transcendent qualities like morality or character,
Speaker 1: in which case is that true, like don't we often
Speaker 1: find things beautiful because they're morally good or thoughtful or meaningful? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Depending on how you interpret it, it it it could mean
Speaker 1: one of two, just dramatically different ideas, and the sense
Speaker 1: in which it is obviously true doesn't really mean anything
Speaker 1: I noticed in the real world. Deepity is often shoot
Speaker 1: by you real fast. They tend to be the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that somebody doesn't just say and leave hanging,
Speaker 1: but they say and then move on from You know,
Speaker 1: they're talking very quickly, like they can sound good for
Speaker 1: half a second if you don't stop to think about them.
Speaker 1: But I was also thinking about deepity is interesting because
Speaker 1: there's something about the way the words sounds that was
Speaker 1: clearly part of the selection process for attaching this word
Speaker 1: to this concept like uh. Originally, Dinntt says that the
Speaker 1: word was coined by a daughter of a friend of his.
Speaker 1: Her name is Miriam Wisenbaum, and originally she had been
Speaker 1: at the dinner table sort of like lightly mocking her
Speaker 1: father for some kind of kind of overly ponderous thing.
Speaker 1: He said uh. And then Dinnett heard this word from
Speaker 1: her and then reimagined it because of the sound of
Speaker 1: the word fits so well with the concept that he
Speaker 1: wanted a word for uh. And it brings to mind
Speaker 1: the concept of idiophones, which we explored on an episode
Speaker 1: of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Basically, the idea that uh,
Speaker 1: certain um syllables and words sounds in our in our
Speaker 1: minds are naturally widely associated with with concepts such as
Speaker 1: physical textures, like there are words that naturally sound slimy
Speaker 1: to us or have certain kind of moral connotations to
Speaker 1: us that are just like sounds totally apart from semantic meaning, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: You often see this in the like the names of
Speaker 1: fictitious characters. Um. Part of this is is we've been
Speaker 1: on a Harry Potter kick at the house and so
Speaker 1: like a lot of the names that J. K. Rowling uses,
Speaker 1: you know that, I feel feel like they line up
Speaker 1: with this rather well. You know, like uh um, several
Speaker 1: snape you know, that's just it drips it. It feels
Speaker 1: and sounds like the the the individual it is. It
Speaker 1: hisses like a Slytherin, Yeah, Slytherin itself exactly. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: I mean there is something going on here. I think like,
Speaker 1: if you're not building a neologism entirely out of root
Speaker 1: words that have semantic meanings, I mean, it's a different
Speaker 1: thing to go with, like malapropism, where that's built out
Speaker 1: of root words from another language age that have some
Speaker 1: kind of meaning already. You wouldn't be able to tell
Speaker 1: what deepity means just by looking at the word right right,
Speaker 1: It doesn't doesn't have a semantic suggestion unless you've heard
Speaker 1: it explain to you or heard it used. So to
Speaker 1: what extent is possible Idiophonic residue guide the choice of
Speaker 1: words being linked to concepts like that. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about it in my head itty deep bitty, the
Speaker 1: itty part of it somehow sounds like the concept to me,
Speaker 1: what brings to mind itty biddy, It brings it mind smallness,
Speaker 1: So it's like a small small depth. But it like
Speaker 1: that's kind of a stretch. It's not there's nothing you
Speaker 1: can't really get there by analyzing actual grammar, right because
Speaker 1: itty bitty is itty bitty even in Webster's I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's it's very much slang. Uh, it's bits. I'm not
Speaker 1: even sure where that comes from, itty bitty, I don't
Speaker 1: know deepitty, just in terms of in examples of have
Speaker 1: invented terminology. Uh, this is what I was thinking about recently.
Speaker 1: Psychonaut because when you when you hear it, I mean
Speaker 1: it's composed out of the out of the Greek. So
Speaker 1: you it's easy to assume that this has been with
Speaker 1: us a very long time, but it is more like malapropism,
Speaker 1: and that it's built out of roots that do have
Speaker 1: meanings that you could identify. Yes, yeah, because I clearly
Speaker 1: it's drawing from the popular use of say astronaut, which
Speaker 1: means star sailor or cosmonaut, universe sailor. And of course
Speaker 1: you have the the argonauts of Greek myth, who were
Speaker 1: simply sailors in the vessel argo um. But psychonaut. When
Speaker 1: I was looking into it, I was thinking, Okay, this
Speaker 1: term must have been around here in the sixties. Uh,
Speaker 1: And it apparently wasn't. The term is widely used now,
Speaker 1: but it didn't seem to emerge until German author Ernst
Speaker 1: Hunger used it in nineteen in the nineteen seventy, and
Speaker 1: it was subsequently picked up by various occultists and ethnobotanists,
Speaker 1: and now it's become, you know, just sort of a
Speaker 1: standard and really quite useful term for describing various twenty
Speaker 1: or twenty first century individuals like say John C. Louis
Speaker 1: or Terrence Mackinna, people who were explorers in the realm
Speaker 1: of the mind. Yeah, yeah, but also yeah, but also
Speaker 1: drawing in that sort of astronaut and motif of one
Speaker 1: of one who goes out by going in and then
Speaker 1: Joe I know you want to discuss, uh, the thagomizer.
Speaker 1: Oh right, this comes from This is one of our favorites.
Speaker 1: It's come up on stuff to blow your mind a lot.
Speaker 1: So the thagomizer is something that was coined as a
Speaker 1: joke in a Gary Larson cartoon. It refers to the
Speaker 1: arrangement of spikes on the tail of a stegasaurus. Uh
Speaker 1: and it's uh So there's a Gary Larson Far Side
Speaker 1: cartoon where a caveman is apparently teaching a class and
Speaker 1: is pointing to a picture like a slide projector I
Speaker 1: G a slide of one of these things and says,
Speaker 1: now this end is called the thagomizer, after the late
Speaker 1: thag Simmons, which is wonderful. Yeah. So, so this was
Speaker 1: eventually picked up by actual paleontologists who found this hilarious
Speaker 1: because prior to this so you didn't have a name
Speaker 1: for the spiked tail is just the spike tail of
Speaker 1: a Stegasaurus or some other type of stegasaur. And when
Speaker 1: you when you try to start breaking down how thagomizer
Speaker 1: would even work as a word, it's crazy because okay,
Speaker 1: we have fag. Fag is the name of the caveman,
Speaker 1: victim of the dinosaur, your proper down there, right. And
Speaker 1: but then we come to almiser O M I z r.
Speaker 1: And this is just nonsense because yes, you do have
Speaker 1: some English words that end with almiser, but their words
Speaker 1: like randomizer, economizer, customizer, atomizer, and these all are root
Speaker 1: words that themselves end in um, like atom and then
Speaker 1: we get atomizer. So where does the arm come from
Speaker 1: in thagom eiser? The eyser part of makes more sense
Speaker 1: because I guess it's kind of like with tenderizer that
Speaker 1: brings us to eyes. So if you allow us to
Speaker 1: further u etomologize here, uh, it is just an old suffix,
Speaker 1: like a long established suffix that that turns that allows
Speaker 1: us to make a noun or adjective into a verb,
Speaker 1: and then this can in turn be made into a noun.
Speaker 1: So I just etymologized. I am the etymologizer, which is
Speaker 1: not a real word but could be could extrapolate into it,
Speaker 1: and you could follow the trails back to real words. Fagomizer,
Speaker 1: if we are stretching, would at best mean a thing
Speaker 1: that turns one into thag simmon, which makes no sense.
Speaker 1: And yet at the same time, the joke still works.
Speaker 1: Like me, clearly it worked. It was picked up, it
Speaker 1: becomes an unofficial name for this part of the dinosaur.
Speaker 1: I think official now is it official? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I think it's used in scientific publications. Well that sounds
Speaker 1: good enough to me. So clearly it works when we
Speaker 1: hear it, even though it doesn't when you dissect it linguistically.
Speaker 1: It's just nonsense. But but we buy into it. I
Speaker 1: guess you know, fag was perhaps atomized or tenderized by
Speaker 1: the spiked tail, and you know that is weirdly a
Speaker 1: relayed in the term thagomizer, even though it's just kind
Speaker 1: of a distorted echo of actual language. Unfortunately, I think
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to call it here for today. We're
Speaker 1: running out of studio time, even though yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: we um we will be back with part two of
Speaker 1: our series Uninvented Words. Here. I'm having a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is a this is a fun one,
Speaker 1: and I like where this journey is going because eventually
Speaker 1: we can even get into the realm of invented language.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you want to check out other
Speaker 1: episodes of Invention, find us wherever you find podcast wherever
Speaker 1: that happens to be. We're there, We're somewhere in there.
Speaker 1: If you go to invention pot dot com that'll shoot
Speaker 1: you over to the I Heart listing for the show,
Speaker 1: but you will find us all over the place. Wherever
Speaker 1: you get the show. Just make sure you subscribe, you rate,
Speaker 1: and you review huge. Thanks as always to our excellent
Speaker 1: audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
Speaker 1: or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 1: just to say hello, you can email us at contact
Speaker 1: at invention in pop dot com. Invention is production of
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